Apologies for the slow posting lately. I’m paying for my sloth over the holidays by rushing to get an abstract written  for this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Thursday, which means I need to have something resembling results…

I thought it would be worth taking a moment and pointing you at this article, though. If I’m reading it correctly, it suggests that Obama may make the moon effort a joint NASA/Pentagon program. That would certainly take some budget pressure off of NASA, since the Pentagon’s space program has a budget of $22 billion, about a third larger than NASA’s. Of course, the idea of using rockets designed for launching satellites and space probes to launch humans instead could be tricky. Rockets have to be much safer to launch a person than to launch hardware, and refitting them can be difficult.

In any case, its an interesting idea, and it would be nice to tap into some funds external to NASA to speed things up.