Florida Wants Space Investment: Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wants $55 million from the state legislature to keep the state competitive in the space arena, the Tallahassee Democrat reports. NASA plans to retire the space shuttle fleet around 2010, and there is no guarantee that the next space launch vehicle(s) would call Florida home. Bush would use approximately $35 million of the budget request to renovate buildings to house shuttle-replacement Crew Exploration Vehicle operations.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.