Photograph by Borna Ghassemi/AFP via Getty Images

A press conference in Tehran after the return of the capsule carrying this monkey was sent above the Earth’s atmosphere on Jan. 28, 2013.

Sen. John McCain, no fan of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, probably wouldn’t mind the Iranian leader blasting off into the wherever. Nothing there is new. How he said it today, though, has rankled some, including a Republican congressman who called the jibe “racist.”

“So Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iranian in space – wasn’t he just there last week? McCain asked in a Twitter message.
The tweet also included a link to a news article with an “Iran launches monkey into space” headline and a link.

So Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iranian in space – wasn’t he just there last week? “Iran launches monkey into space” news.yahoo.com/iran-launches-…

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) February 4, 2013

Said monkey was apparently launched upward 75 miles and retrieved alive last week, according to Iranian media. Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying he’d be willing to be the first human launched to space by Iran’s nascent space program. Spokesman Brian Rogers confirmed in an e-mail that the Twitter posting was McCain’s own, saying it “was obviously a joke poking fun at Ahmadinejad’s outer space ambitions, as he made clear in a follow-up tweet 52 minutes later:

Re: Iran space tweet – lighten up folks, can’t everyone take a joke?

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) February 4, 2013

Michigan’s Republican Rep. Justin Amash didn’t see the humor.

Maybe you should wisen up & not make racist jokes. “@senjohnmccain: Re: Iran space tweet – lighten up folks, can’t everyone take a joke?”

— Justin Amash (@repjustinamash) February 4, 2013

Original post is McCain’s Ahmadinejad ‘Monkey’ Line: ‘Lighten Up, Folks’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty image

Space Shuttle Atlantis rolls down Kennedy Parkway on its way to its new home at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

With its shuttle fleet retired and on display at museums around the country, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is looking to shed its shuttle facilities and equipment.

NASA is in talks with a handful of space companies and partnerships that may be interested in buying or leasing the buildings and gear, according to Amber Philman, an agency spokeswoman at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“We hope to make a bunch of announcements over the next year,” she said in a telephone interview.

Boeing Co. already has taken up residence in one of the sites. In October 2011, three months after Atlantis completed the last shuttle mission, the agency announced an agreement with Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, to reuse an orbiter processing facility at Kennedy.

Chicago-based Boeing announced it will build and test its new manned spacecraft there, creating as many as 550 jobs.

With the shuttle gone from Kennedy’s iconic Vehicle Assembly Building, the agency is looking for more companies to relocate to the complex, Philman said. The 525-foot-tall building was built in 1966 to assemble the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket.

“We have this unique infrastructure that’s been here for so many years,” Philman said. “We would love to bring space industry companies out here and grow the industry.”

Original post is NASA to Shed Old Shuttle Sites by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chris Thompson/SpaceX via Bloomberg

Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s (SpaceX) Falcon 9 rocket takes off in Cape Canaveral, Florida on May 18, 2012.

The CEOs of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. are trading jabs over the upstart competitor’s push into the $70 billion military launch market.

A Lockheed-Boeing Co. joint venture has had a lock on the work for six years. SpaceX, which showed twice this year it could get to the International Space Station, is now trying to break into the business of launching U.S. military and spy satellites.

The Lockheed-Boeing venture, United Launch Alliance, has launched “hundreds of billions of dollars” of satellites on 66 consecutive missions, said Robert Stevens, Lockheed’s chairman and chief executive officer.

“I’m hugely pleased with 66 in a row from ULA, and I don’t know the record of SpaceX yet,” Stevens said at a Dec. 14 Bloomberg Government breakfast in Washington. “Two in a row?”

“Cost doesn’t matter at all if you don’t put the ball into orbit,” he said. “You can thrift on cost. You can take cost out of a rocket. But I will guarantee you, in my experience, when you start pulling a lot of costs out of a rocket, your quality and your probability of success in delivering a payload to orbit diminishes.”

All of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 missions have reached orbit and “completed all primary mission objectives,” Musk said in an e-mailed statement. The Air Force last month awarded the Hawthorne, California-based company two trial launch missions.

On the cost issue, Musk said: “The fundamental reason SpaceX’s rockets are lower cost and more powerful is that our technology is significantly more advanced than that of the Lockheed-Boeing rockets, which were designed last century.”

Original post is Musk’s Toe in Launch Market Draws Lockheed Jab by Political Capital.