NASA should begin developing a mission that can tell us whether life in the near galaxy is abundant, rare or essentially absent, The National Academy of Sciences recommended yesterday. The call for a next Grand Observatory telescope with this ambitious goal represents the first time that the Academy, in its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and …
A Call To Action on Ensuring That Extraordinary Claims About ET Life Come With Extraordinary Evidence
The global scientific search for signs of life beyond Earth has produced cutting-edge and paradigm-shifting science for several decades now, and it has clearly found eager audiences around the world. This search is a high-priority goal of NASA and other space agencies, as well as institutions, universities and companies. While the successes in this broadly …
The Many Ways The James Webb Space Telescope Could Fail
When a damaged Apollo 13 and its crew were careening to Earth, mission control director Gene Kranz famously told the assembled NASA team that "failure is not an option." Actually, the actor playing Kranz in the "Apollo 13" movie spoke those words, but by all accounts Kranz and his team lived that phrase, with a …
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NExSS 2.0
The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,” began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system. With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search …
Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The word "SETI" pretty much brings to mind the search for radio signals come from distant planets, the movie "Contact," Jill Tarter, Frank Drake and perhaps the SETI Institute, where the effort lives and breathes. But there was a time when SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- was a significantly broader concept, that …
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Back to the Future on the Moon
What does NASA's drive to return to the moon have to do with worlds of exoplanets and astrobiology that are generally discussed here? The answer is actually quite a lot. Not so much about the science, although current NASA plans would certainly make possible some very interesting science regarding humans living in deep space, as …
A Reprieve for Space Science?
A quick update on a recent column about whether our "golden age" of space science and discovery was in peril because of cost overruns and Trump administration budget priorities that emphasized human space travel over science. The 2018 omnibus spending bill that was passed Wednesday night by the House of Representatives and Thursday night …
Space Science In Peril
NASA's decades-long success at enabling ground-breaking discoveries about our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, our origins and the billions of other planets out there is one of the crown jewels of our nation's collective inventiveness and will, and surely of our global soft power. Others have of course made major contributions as well. But …
Is That the Foundation of NASA I Feel Shifting?
Reading about some of the views coming from the man recently nominated to become NASA's Administrator, Rep. James Bridenstine of Oklahoma, I heard the sound of a door closing. Other doors will surely be opened if he is confirmed by the Senate, but that shutting door happens to be to the gateway to a realm …
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Has America Really Lost It’s "Lead in Space?"
I was moved to weigh in after reading Vice President Mike Pence's comments last week down at the Kennedy Space Center -- a speech that seemed to minimize NASA's performance in recent years (decades?) and to propose a return to a kind of Manifest Destiny way of thinking in space. The speech did not appear …
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Many Worlds 