NASA and India's ISRO to Collaborate on Human Spaceflight

NASA has announced that it has signed an agreement with India's space agency "establishing the terms for future cooperation between the two agencies in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes." Later they state that the "two agencies will identify areas of mutual interest and seek to develop cooperative programs or projects in . . . human space flight," among other things.

This is a great way to make NASAs dollar go further. Collaboration with India's maturing space agency will open new possibilities with what NASA can accomplish with their budget. Contact the presidential candidates and your legislators and tell them that NASA can have ambitious goals and international collaboration will allow for those goals to be reached affordably while promoting world peace.

Democratic Debate tonight

Despite no mention of the issue last night during the republican debate, space should be a topic during the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at the debate tonight. Our popularity among the questions was much higher for the democratic questions than the republican ones. Be sure to watch the debate on TV on CNN or go to cnn.com and stream it live.

Romney Supports Missions to the Moon and Mars

UPDATE: After the chips have all fallen, Romney did not come as strong as Rudy Giuliani, at least note at first. He says that he needs to "study" the issue more. 

From the Orlando Sentinnel:

Fresh of the press, Romney's statements:

I support the NASA program, the president's vision program, which consists of a manned space mission back to the moon, as well as an ongoing mission to Mars, and with that happy to take any questions you may have.

That sounds to me like he is dodging the commitment to send men to mars.

the key thing is to maintain the technology and the personnel that has the proprietary technology to manage a mission such as the new vision program. And so there's gonna have to be an effort to either narrow the gap or to maintain technology or to provide opportunities for the key engineers and personnel so that we don't lose the capacity to carry the program forward

I'm not prepared to make commitments without having studied things, having grown up in a sector where you study things thoroughly before you make a decision.

Tell him that he needs to start studying things right about now.

we can't afford to lose people who have proprietary technology if we're going to do a successful space program.

A tepid pledge of support, I feel. Our work is not done on Romney.

And We Have Liftoff!

The space community had responded to the call and we are coming out en masse to make our voices heard in the Jan 30 and 31 politico debates in Los Angeles. Since Saturday night, the questions have flooded into politico.com for the CNN televised debate. Not only that, but the space questions have been voted to the top of both the Republican and Democratic debates. Wired has reported on our success.

What is different about this political movement from the space community is that it is not the traditional scramble to promote one space initiative over another, but it is an effort to promote space exploration in general to our would be political leaders.

Keep up the good work!

Even before those debates heat up, we have another opportunity to make our voices heard:

CNN's Wolf Blitzer has asked for suggestions to what he might ask. With almost 3000 suggestions as of this writing, I suspect that they might data mine the comments for common themes, so lets get our themes in the debate!

Continue submitting and voting for questions at dyn.politico.com/debate.

We need to band together, and watch out for more opportunities to flex our muscle. Email me or comment about other debates and opportunities to give feedback, so that I can post them here. In the meantime, check here for information about current legislation, threats to the community, and methods to contact our legislators to promote the most noble endeavor the human family has yet embarked on.