Your faithful Space Blogger here, to put more meat on the bones of Barack Obama's space plans. Today we tackle the big topic, the human interest - manned spaceflight.

Since 1981, the Space Shuttle has been NASA's workhorse. Its retirement will leave NASA without human spaceflight capability until the first elements of the Constellation program are operational. This leaves a 5 year gap between the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the entry into service of its replacement is a serious concern.

Barack Obama has committed to making investments that will reduce this 5 year gap, and to minimise reliance on foreign space capabilities. He also promises to work with the US space industry to retain its workforce and technical capabilities during the transition from the shuttle to its successor.

The options include keeping his options open for additional Space Shuttle flights to keep the workforce occupied and working to support additional funding so that it does not impact on the Constellation program’s development.

Obama also plans to push through development of the Shuttle's successor systems in the face of difficulties brought about by the Bush administration’s apparent under funding of NASA.

Stimulating efforts within the (US) private sector to develop and demonstrate spaceflight capabilities is also on Obama’s hitlist. NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services which broke the NASA tradition by engaging entrepreneurs from SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler in 2006, is a held up as a model of this kind of public - private collaboration.

The ambitious UK-led lunar program, MoonLITE, was presented at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London last Friday by SSTL's Phil Davies. Coordinated by SSTL partner in space Dr. Stuart Eves, the meeting discussed the scientific applications of small satellites in lunar missions. A number of overseas speakers attended to present their existing programmes and a number of UK papers on future mission proposals were also presented.

Feedback on the programme of talks has been excellent and it seems that many are conviced that world class science is now possible using high capability small satellites. You can find out more and read presentation on the University of Leicester's Astronomy with small satellites web page.

America's next President, Barack Obama has got plans for NASA. He hopes not only will inspire the world with manned and robotic space exploration, apply the World's most significant space program to take a help tackle climate change, energy independence, and aeronautics research. In achieving this vision, Obama will cooperate with international partners and engage the private sector to amplify NASA's reach. He believes that a revitalized NASA can help America maintain its innovation edge and contribute to American economic growth.

For those who like to hear it from the man himself, why not tune in m in below.



There is currently no organisation in the US Gvernment that oversees a comprehensive and integrated strategy and policy dealing with all aspects of the government's space- related programs. This wasn't always the case, between 1958 and 1973 the National Aeronautics and Space Council oversaw all space activities for four presidents.

The Council was briefly revived from 1989 to 1992, but Barack Obama will re-establish National Aeronautics and Space Council reporting to the president. It will oversee and coordinate civilian, military, commercial and national security space activities undetaken by NASA, the Department of Defense, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Commerce Department, the Transportation Department, and other federal agencies. It promises to solicit public participation, engage the international community, and work toward a 21st century vision of space developing new technologies.

Given the enormous importance of Obama's plans to the International space industry Space Blog will continue this discussion later this week with an insight into Barack Obama's plans for manned spaceflight.

Time Magazine has selected Bundle Protocol testing and the download of an image of the Cape of Good Hope from UK-DMC as one of the ten best inventions of 2008.

In September, a satellite used the new protocol to relay an image of the Cape of Good Hope back to Earth.

The "Orbital Internet" discussed in this award report is enabled by the cooperation around CLEO - a Cisco router in low Earth orbit onboard the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellite, UK-DMC. Lloyd Wood developed this idea from the CLEO project with the support of Cisco Systems Space team, NASA Glenn Research Center and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd at the University of Surrey.

This is not the first award that those involved with CLEO have won for its pioneering work in breaking the final frontier of Internet domination, which includes the Times Higher Education Supplement award 2006 and Computerworld awards.

For this test the Bundle Protocol was implemented by reusing the ground-based testbed built for CLEO. NASA Glenn originally relied on this testbed for preparing the in-orbit CLEO router for use in the satelite environment, but it is now used to develop code for UK-DMC's onboard computers.

The Cape of Good Hope image was downloaded in these experiments by carrying it in the Bundle Protocol over Saratoga. The Bundle Protocol, developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group, is considered a leading candidate for creating the Interplanetary Internet. Saratoga is a fast file transfer protocol for hop-by-hop transfers on privately-owned networks - including the intermittently-connected networks used for delay-tolerant networking.

Find out more about the Internet in Orbit and this work leading to this award on the Bundle Protocol tests page.