President Obama gave a speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center today to outline his new, revamped space policy.

You may remember that his last revamping caused quite a stir, with people screaming that it would doom NASA. I disagree. Canceling Constellation still strikes me as the right thing to do, because it was becoming an albatross around NASA’s neck. Mind you, this was also the recommendation of the blue ribbon Augustine panel. You may also note that NASA astronauts are split over all this, with Buzz Aldrin, for example, supporting Obama, and Neil Armstrong and many others disagreeing.

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DARMSTADT, Germany – The European Space Agency launched a new high-tech satellite Thursday to measure the effects of global warming on Earth’s polar ice and gather data on rising sea levels, information that could prove crucial to millions on the globe’s coasts and islands.

ESA said at its European Space Operations Center in Germany Thursday it received a signal from CryoSat 2 after it took off on a Russian launcher rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, meaning lift-off was successful.

“So far, everything went fantastically,” said Volker Liebig, ESA Director for Earth Observation Programs.

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years — farther than ever before in time and space — to reveal a “primordial population” of galaxies never seen before.

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“Space.com has a piece about changing theories of planet migration. The classic picture suggests that planets like Earth should have plummeted into the sun while they were still planetesimals, asteroid-sized building blocks that eventually collide to form full-fledged planets.

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