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BROOKS TIGNER, BRUSSELS

Taboo for many years for reasons of national sovereignty, questions of space policy and security are rising rapidly on the European Union’s agenda. The threats of terrorism, organized crime, illegal immigration and global warming are pushing the 27 EU nations to cooperate on space assets and services that can serve both commercial and military users.

“We all agree that there is no security [in Europe] without space,” said European Commission (EC) space official Paul Weissenberg at a May 2 hearing on space organized by the European Parliament’s subcommittee on security and defense. “If we want to be independent, Europe must use space as an asset and it must offer a mixture of civil and military applications.”

Weissenberg heads the aerospace, security, defense and equipment policy office at the EC’s Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry. His office was largely responsible for steering to completion the commission’s new European Space Policy, unveiled here April 26 after two years of sensitive negotiations with national capitals and European institutions involved in space research and operations.

The policy was presented by Gunter Verheugen, European commissioner for enterprise policy, and Jacques Dordain, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) director general. Dordain said the new space policy was “an important step forward for Europe; it brings an EU dimension to space and a space dimension to the EU.”

The 17-page document was defined by the commission and the Paris-based ESA in the wake of their strategic partnership in 2003 to oversee development of the European Union’s two main space programs: Galileo and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).

Galileo will be a global navigation network of 30 satellites and ground stations funded by the union and ESA. The GMES is a pan-European initiative funded by governments to harmonize information services based on Earth observation data for public-sector users.

Both programs have had delays, but Galileo’s have been worse due to bitter disputes over work-share and other industry issues within the industrial consortium managing Galileo’s commercial operation. The in-fighting finally forced Verheugen’s fellow commissioner for transport policy, Jacques Barrot, to issue an ultimatum in March, warning the companies to solve their issues by September or be expelled from the program.

Despite the project’s setbacks, Verheugen said, “We don’t have the option of giving up on Galileo. That is out of the question. We have to decide what kind of budget we will devote to it.”

The commission said it will propose an “appropriate legal and managerial framework” this year to meet the needs of Galileo’s industrial partners.

Galileo and GMES await definition of their security and military dimensions. While Galileo is overwhelmingly commercial in orientation, a small portion of its satellite communication bandwidth will be reserved for encrypted public-sector use, including the military.

GMES’ security applications are potentially much wider since the program’s raison d’être is to create a harmonized satellite services distribution system for public-sector users based on common software, data-sharing protocols and standardized parameters for earth observation and environmental measurements.

“The potential intelligence applications are obviously vast,” an EU official said May 3. “But there are a hell of a lot of public sector actors involved, so the coordination will be complicated. We’ll get there, bit by bit, but we’ll get there.”

The new European Space Policy sets out a number of key initiatives for the short term. These include:

• Definition by the EU nations of security-related requirements for GMES before the end of 2007.
• Identification this year of Galileo’s panoply of applications.
• Pilot phase start-up in 2008 of GMES’ first three operational services covering land, marine and emergency-response sectors.
• New research and development projects for integrated space applications to be proposed before the end of 2008.

Staff report
Posted : Tuesday May 8, 2007 18:06:46 EDT

NASA astronaut and Air Force Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew will join the crew of the STS-118 space shuttle mission, targeted for launch Aug. 9.

Drew, born in Washington, will take a seat that opened when astronaut Clayton Anderson was moved to shuttle Atlantis’ STS-117 flight, which is targeted to launch June 8. Anderson will begin a long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and current station crew member Navy Cmdr. Suni Williams will return to Earth aboard Atlantis.

Shuttle Endeavour will carry Drew on his first spaceflight. He will serve as a mission specialist during STS-118, which will deliver another segment to continue building the station by 2010. Navy Cmdr. Scott Kelly will serve as STS-118’s commander, and Marine Corps Lt. Col. Charles Hobaugh will be the pilot. Mission specialists are Tracy Caldwell, Ph.D., Rick Mastracchio, Barbara Morgan, the first educator astronaut, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Dr. Dave Williams.

Checkout the videos, in particular:

Rough-Cut Entry, Descent, and Landing Animation  (Dan Maas)

This May 2006 document from the National Academies (8MB PDF) has some scary numbers:

in $ billions

Observatory .......... HST ...Chandra.... JWST (projected)
Development cost .. 4.1 ..... 3.4 .......... 3.3
Lifecycle cost.......... 7.5 ...... 3.8 .......... 4.5

and space science doesn't get funded huh?

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/200 … lesco.html
The discovery of possibly habitable planet Gliese 581C last week by European astronomers (working from a telescope in Chile) caused a stir in the stargazing world. Some people are already wondering how they can get there. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: Nobody has actually seen the planet that's been calculated to be orbiting Gliese 581, a dim red star that's part of the Libra constellation. We just know its size (five times larger than earth), and its possible temperature range (0 to 40° Celsius).

Times like these call for special space-based telescopes called Terrestrial Planet Finders (TPFs), which are made to detect Earth-like aspects of planets in other solar systems. Wired has posted a gallery of renderings of NASA's proposed TPF and the European Space Agency's proposed Darwin mission, which would serve a similar purpose. Both projects have run into "political, technical and financial difficulties," according to The New York Times. Perhaps the Gliese 581C discovery will inspire the people in charge to solve them.

So maybe the quoted price is off for the upper stage.

I am more concerned thou with how the contract will get written in that Nasa has a habit of not paying per piece but writting that the company delivers per request but is paid full contract value regardless how many get made. Of course the contract that Nasa writes for the contractors gets written for the largest quantity value and the dollars are inflated to cover that number. The contractor laughs all the way to the bank knowing that there is extra cash in it for them.

$230 billion is the BIG shock number invented by the GAO last year for the entire cost of VSE out to 2025.