* Rick Boozer urges grassroots support for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program : U.S Citizens: Demand Maximum Support of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program – Astro Maven.

Commercial Crew has the potential to do for American human spaceflight what Commercial Cargo is already doing for the American satellite launch industry. Making manned spaceflight much cheaper will lead to more human business activity in space, helping our nation’s economy to thrive. The three companies developing spacecraft under this program are Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and SpaceX. These companies will offer individuals, industries and friendly governments lower cost access to space that other countries would find difficult to match. Indeed, the German government is already funding a study of the practicality of using SNC’s Dreamchaser spacecraft for its human spaceflight operations. See: https://www.ohb-system.de/press-releases-…

* Joel Achenbach continues his in-depth series on space policy with an article about the funding woes of NASA’s planetary science and astrophysics programs: Space scientists fear a new era of cost limits on big NASA missions, just as the universe is getting exponentially more interesting – The Washington Post

Achenbach dismisses the impact of the NewSpace industry on space science because, ” Knowledge is powerful, but not always profitable”. However, that misses the point of NewSpace, which is to lower the costs significantly for launching to space and for doing things in space. Lower costs will obviously benefit space science. As Stewart Money explains, if NASA switches its unmanned spacecraft launches to a SpaceX Falcon 9, the agency would save enough on a single launch to cover, for example, the costs of continuing the Cassini mission for a year: More “InSight” into Launch Costs – Innerspace.net (I linked to a Google cached copy because Stewart’s blog was down at the moment).

More space policy/politics related links:

• Guest column: NASA’s new direction: Commercial space race off and running – Florida Today – Stephen  C. Smith (Space KSC blog) gives an excellent summary of the history of the Commercial Cargo and Crew programs.
• U.S. Air Force Still Deciding if Initial Falcon 9 v1.1 Flights Count Toward Certfication – SpaceNews.com – USAF would save hundreds of millions per launch with a switch to the F9 and the Falcon Heavy, but it would appear that they want to think about this for as long as possible, implement the new launchers as slowly as possible, and spend as many extra billions on EELVs as possible.
• U.S., Russia in co-dependent space race – Leigh Munsil/POLITICO.com – A example of the typical political analyst’s view of NASA, which cannot even see the growing role thta commercial industry is playing  much less say anything intelligent on how it will impact NASA’s human spaceflight program.