Space news-----I would not hold my breath.---re Tyson comment

Neil deGrasse Tyson:
How space exploration can make America great again
 
Chris Heller - The Atlantic
 
Neil deGrasse Tyson is not pleased with the plight of NASA. After the agency's decades-old space shuttle program was shuttered last year -- ending the kind of low-Earth orbit exploration that the astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director jokes "boldly went where man had gone hundreds of times before" -- Tyson believes America is at a critical moment for future space exploration. Maybe that's why he originally wanted to call his new book Failure to Launch: The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts. (After publishers balked at the depressing title, it was renamed Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.) Over the last few decades, Tyson writes, Americans deluded themselves into believing misconceptions about space travel, and, as a result, the purpose and necessities of a space program are now misunderstood. In a conversation last week, I asked Tyson about American curiosity toward space, what needs to be done to save NASA, and how he's been able to make science accessible to the general public.
 
“A Bad Call”: The Accident Which Almost Lost Project Gemini
 
Ben Evans - AmericaSpace.org
 
When astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell returned to Earth in December 1965, having spent a record-breaking 14 days in orbit, the path seemed clear to meeting President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. Borman and Lovell had shown that astronauts could survive an extended duration flight and, earlier in their mission, the tricky art of rendezvous with another manned craft – Gemini VI-A, piloted by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford – had also been triumphantly accomplished. The following year, 1966, would build on their achievements, with four complex Gemini missions devoted to mastering the techniques of rendezvous, docking and spacewalking. These would lay the final groundwork for the first Apollo missions in 1967. Little could anyone have foreseen that a calamity of unimaginable proportions would unfold with horrifying suddenness one dreary morning in St Louis, Missouri, which threatened to halt all of these plans in their tracks. In fact, had this calamity occurred a matter of feet in another direction, it might have ended Project Gemini outright.
 
U.S. Air Force space plane marks one year in orbit
 
Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com
 
The U.S. Air Force's second X-37B space plane marked one year in orbit Monday, continuing its clandestine mission more than 200 miles above Earth. The robotic spacecraft's purpose is secret, but Air Force officials acknowledge the vehicle is performing well one year after it blasted off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on March 5, 2011.
 
SLS Will Never ‘Back Up’ Commercial Crew
 
James Muncy – Space News (Commentary)
 
(Muncy is founder and principal of PoliSpace, an independent space policy consultancy)
 
The release of President Barack Obama’s NASA budget plan for fiscal 2013 has triggered the usual chattering about what (and who) got too little or too much funding. Some offer hyperbole about the “catastrophic” impact of a cut or even an insufficiently large increase. The 2013 submission clearly implements the 2010 Authorization Act compromise within an overall budget cap, and honors the deals struck last fall between then-Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew and key senators on exploration funding and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). So the only quasi-justified uproar is over Mars exploration having to pay for saving JWST. But without the overt provocations of recent years, some in Congress are digging up obsolete assumptions to justify further criticisms of the Obama administration’s spaceflight budget priorities.