Obama’s space plan is bad for the United States’ future as a technological superpower. It’s actually bad for the entire world . That’s basically the summary of Neil Armstrong and 26 NASA legends’ open letter to President Obama.—JD More

Overkill, thy name is Vertu . Nokia’s luxury handset division has rarely gotten much love on these pages, but that’s mostly to do with the excessive use of “high end” materials on its phones and zeroes in its prices. Both are present and accounted for here, with the stainless steel and leather-bound Constellation Ayxta starting at somewhere around $7,500. Still, we retain a curiosity to see such exclusive devices in the glaring lights of reality, and Gear Diary has treated us to just such a treat. The handset before you can crank out 6 hours of talk time over GSM or 300 hours of standby, navigate preloaded maps over GPS, or hook you up to an instant Concierge service if you don’t feel like doing the work yourself. And why should you

If anyone has an Ares 1 rocket they need launching, NASA has a brand new, never-been-used $500 million mobile launching pad that’s just itching to hurl something rocket-sized into space. More

Once upon a time, a President thought that taking humans “to the Moon and the planets beyond” was not only good for the economy of the country, but also would push US technology decades beyond everybody’s else. He was right. That President was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Of course, he also wanted to go to the Moon to beat the Soviet Union and win a political war, but there were a thousand more reasons to make that trip. All of them were good. As a result of his political will, the Apollo program became the most complex, most advanced, most successful, most beneficial technology endeavor ever taken by the United States of America

A panel of space experts assembled by President Obama were expected to inform the White House today that unless they can round up some more cash, they won’t have the funds to make it back to the Moon before 2020. The UK Guardian says the report was apparently surprising to some inside NASA, who thought the project was more or less on track. Nine billion dollars have already been sunk into the Ares I rocket, which now risks becoming the most expensive pile of scrap metal ever seen. And thanks to a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit, the chance of that extra funding coming from the government seems unlikely. This also throws a bit of a wrench in the plans of the Constellation project, which aims to put someone on Mars by the middle part of the century. But again, without funding and the additional voyages (like that to the moon), the 81 billion dollar project will suffer some epic setbacks.

Looks like Flash Gordon came to Virginia this Wednesday. Here you have images and video of the spectacular Max Launch Abort System in action. Sadly, the spiffy spacecraft won’t be in Orion . Maybe they can send me one to test.

NASA’s Jeffery Hanley went to the US Human Spaceflght Plans committee in Washington to do a show and tell on Constellation , the space program that will take us to the Moon and Mars. He played this report on its state. While there are some naysayers who claim that Orion , Ares I and V are not the best option to take us back into real space exploration, NASA thinks the contrary. The Right Stuff people says that only after three years they are already testing actual components , and they have all needed hardware and software in various stages of development.

May 2019: Our scheduled return to the moon. There’s plenty of laboring to be done on the Constellation Program before then, but the foundation is set. Here’s how you—as an astronaut—would experience the mission: Ares V Unmanned Cargo Rocket, EDS and Altair: The Gear Goes Up First First it’s the turn of the giant unmanned Ares V , carrying most of the real hardware you’ll need on your journey. You and the rest of your astronaut compadres walk around the pad hours ahead of the launch—a metaphorical kicking of Ares’ tires.

It seems like only yesterday that we were hearing about Paragon’s designs for greenhouses on the lunar surface (but that’s because it was yesterday). Now we’ve been hepped to the fact that the company is teaming up with Oceaneering International to overhaul NASA’s space suit. The last that we heard, the project had been scuttled altogether , but you know how quickly things can be unscuttled when the White House changes hands. The Constellation Space Suit System (CSSS) will be designed in a modular fashion, so that the same suit can be used by the astronaut for all the different aspects of his / her mission. You can look forward to the stylish debut of these bad boys on the new Orion spaceship, currently planned to launch in 2015.

NASA is now showing Orion—the spacecraft that will take humans to the Moon and Mars—at the National Mall in Washington. It’s not the real thing , but it looks great ( needs more pretty decals ). [ NASA's Orion at Gizmodo ]