The real issue for this debate is: why does human space flight and space science have to be lost link. In breaking from LEO-dominated strategies, Constellation has the opportunity to embrace multi-tasking and multi-role missions that could once again converge these two oft disparate priorities. Get us back to where we thought we were going in the late 70s and early 1980s.

First see the comments in the video from Dr. David S. Leckrone. This comment is way down the thread from David Baker, a veteran of NASA, etc.

Candid Comments on the Constellation Program | NASA Watch

The world of American copyright scholars is very familiar with the poetic passage of Jefferson's, written in a letter:
...
David Ellerman writes to point to an earlier version of the same point, this one penned by Augustine. As Augustine wrote:
...
Ellerman is a researcher who had worked for Stiglitz at the World Bank. Thanks to him, Augustine is the new Jefferson.

Jefferson's remix of Augustine's insight (Lessig Blog)

Can Germans laugh at Hitler?

This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.

Abroad - The Führer Returns to Berlin, This Time Saluted Only by Laughs - NYTimes.com

How did cap and trade, hatched as an academic theory in obscure economic journals half a century ago, become the policy of choice in the debate over how to slow the heating of the planet? And how did it come to eclipse the idea of simply slapping a tax on energy consumption that befouls the public square or leaves the nation hostage to foreign oil producers?

From a Theory to a Consensus on Emissions - NYTimes.com

Editor's note: NASA Watch has learned that Major General Charles F. Bolden will most likely be named NASA's next administrator according to our sources. He will still need to be confirmed by the Senate.

NASA's Next Administrator - Charles F. Bolden | NASA Watch

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle
Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.

Space Shuttle Transits the Sun | SpaceRef - Space News as it Happens

On Tuesday, Ms. Girard, 39, who lives in the Austin, Tex., area, filed a lawsuit against Myriad and the Patent Office, challenging the decision to grant a patent on a gene to Myriad and companies like it. She was joined by four other cancer patients, by professional organizations of pathologists with more than 100,000 members and by several individual pathologists and genetic researchers.

The lawsuit, believed to be the first of its kind, was organized by the American Civil Liberties Union and filed in federal court in New York. It blends patent law, medical science, breast cancer activism and an unusual civil liberties argument in ways that could make it a landmark case.

Cancer Patients Challenge the Patenting of a Gene - NYTimes.com

An English chemist has found the hidden gateway to the RNA world, the chemical milieu from which the first forms of life are thought to have emerged on earth some 3.8 billion years ago.

Chemist Shows How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life - NYTimes.com

Marking its first major effort to overhaul financial regulation, the Obama administration will seek new authority to supervise the virtually unregulated complex financial instruments, known as derivatives, that were a major cause of the market crisis, Congressional aides and others who have been briefed on the decision said Wednesday.

Obama Pushes Broad Rules for Oversight of Derivatives - NYTimes.com

Aurora Flight Sciences announced today that the company has been selected for a NASA Phase II award to develop technology to support autonomous control and protection of space-based nuclear reactor systems.

OMG, a .aero domain seen in the wild!

Apparently, nasa hasn't given up on space-based fission reactors either which is good news for deep space exploration.

Aurora Flight Sciences - Aurora Wins NASA Contract for Autonomous Control of Space-Nuclear Reactors