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to complete construction of a "relatively large" manned space laboratory around 2020

The Orbit Determination Program (ODP) of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was used in the data analysis, is based on an expression for the gravitational delay which differs from the standard formula; this difference is of second order in powers of $m$ -- the sun's gravitational radius -- but in Cassini's case it was much larger than the expected order of magnitude $m^2/b$, where $b$ is the ray's closest approach distance. Since the ODP does not account for any other second-order terms, it is necessary, also in view of future more accurate experiments, to systematically evaluate higher order corrections and to determine which terms are significant.

engineers seem to have a diminished ability to understand biology

Remember them the next time you read a story claiming some brain-like accomplishment of a computer. The only really human thing these programs are doing is attracting attention to themselves

Bolden didn't provide any direct answers to whether the agency would continue to send humans into space in the coming decade, as recommended by a report from a blue-ribbon panel last October. However, Bolden promised that the program would not be paid for through cuts to the agency's science budget, which has been cannibalized in recent years to support space flights. The auditorium erupted in applause. Bolden avoided getting into any specifics on the next generation of NASA manned spacecraft, a topic of hot debate.

NASA's grand plan to return to the moon, built on President George W. Bush's vision of an ambitious new chapter in space exploration, is about to vanish with hardly a whimper

a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit

Obama budget as disastrous for human space fligh

“superb from a science standpoint,” but beyond Europe’s current budget

There was some questioning of the cost estimate for Euclid, but at some point you have to decide: Either you don’t believe the estimates that [ESA science program managers] produced, or you assume their estimates are credible. Euclid was the one mission where costs were debated, but the consensus was to use the cost estimates presented to us.

DARPA for several years has been working on a program dubbed System F6 that seeks to prove that a cluster of small spacecraft can perform the mission of a large spacecraft by communicating wirelessly with one another in space

DARPA plans to launch three dedicated System F6 spacecraft either to low Earth orbit or geostationary orbit in mid-2013 to 2014

semi-autonomous cluster reconfiguration

Pattern is a web mining module for the Python programming language. It bundles tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks).

In 2002, the European Space Agency began a program called Don Quijote to find out how best to perform such a deflection.

Now, Stephen Wolters at the Open University in the UK and a few friends have published a new analysis of the mission saying that measuring the change in orbit is not enough. Instead, the spacecraft needs to characterise the impact in detail, determining the density of the material near the asteroid's surface, the size of the surface grains as well as the mass and speed distribution of the impact ejecta.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1107.4229: Measurement Requirements For A Near-Earth Asteroid Impact Mitigation Demonstration Mission