Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
A scientist and a former astronaut told a Senate panel June 6 that the medical consequences of long-duration space travel are not well understood and proposed cuts to NASA's life science budget will leave crucial questions unanswered as the agency tries to send people back to the moon and on to Mars. "Simply put, the biological risks associated with exploration-class spaceflight are far from being mitigated," said James Pawelczyk, associate professor of physiology and kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University.
The Pentagon's latest cost estimate for the scaled-back National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) program is $11.5 billion through 2020, according to a U.S. Air Force spokeswoman. NPOESS is built by Northrop Grumman and managed jointly by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Air Force and NASA. Plagued by sensor development problems, NPOESS breached the 25 percent Nunn-McCurdy cost growth cap last year.
NASA on June 5 announced the roles that its field centers will play in the agency's space exploration plans, which keep most of the centers' traditional human spaceflight duties intact while finding additional work for other centers to get them more involved in sending astronauts into space.
