Congressional auditors agree that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), one of the agency’s most complex and costly science projects, is proceeding well along its restructured plan, but the Hubble successor has little fiscal room for error or surprise difficulties leading up to its expected October 2018 launch.

NASA will get four more years to operate the International Space Station under a White House decision announced Jan. 8.

DREAM CHASER: Sierra Nevada Corp. has made agreements with the European Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center to explore potential applications of European technology to the company’s Dream Chaser reusable human spacecraft. “This international collaboration will also help define missions outside the Dream Chaser’s primary mission of ferrying U.S. and partner nation astronauts to low Earth orbit, thereby helping to maintain the global space partnerships established between these agencies and the United States space program,” the company said Jan. 8.

NASA skirted internal processes and cost-saving agreements established with the Department of Defense when it chose to refurbish the B-2 test stand at the agency’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for testing of the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage, according to agency Inspector General Paul K. Martin. The SLS core stage is the foundation for the new upgradable heavy-lift rocket envisioned to send U.S. astronauts on future missions of deep space exploration.

SpaceX launched its second commercial communications satellite — Thaicom 6 — with an upgraded Falcon 9 on Jan. 6. But the company fell silent immediately after the Orbital Sciences Corp. spacecraft was to have deployed, raising the possibility that the new rocket’s troublesome upper stage failed to perform as advertised.

Click here to view the pdf

Medical experts face a significant challenge in their search for the causes, ultimate effects and remedies for the vision problems reported by astronauts assigned to long-duration missions aboard the International Space Station, according to a National Academies’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) review. The review urges NASA-guided scientists to expand their search for contributing factors, pre- and post-flight evaluation techniques and appropriate ground-based analog studies.

This week could see a surge of news on fresh fiscal 2014 appropriations, as House and Senate appropriators are working feverishly to put together a so-called omnibus spending bill by Jan. 15, when the stopgap continuing resolution (CR) of 2013 funds runs out.