Focus on something better

My darling wife brought me home a copy of Focus science magazine the other night. I'd never read it before.

It was a "Britain in Space" special, featuring a British Space Rocket, Starchaser - same rockets as always, but rather a nice picture of them being trawled down a main road along with their launch towers - and promising Spaceplanes Ascender and Skylon.

Now excuse me, but I haven't heard anything new from the Bennett camp in more than a couple of years, and from what I can tell, nothing new has come out of REL or BSP in a couple of decades

Why can't these science magazines cover current projects that are actually happening, or at least are being worked on? Please stand up, Prof Ball, Prof Pillenger and Prof Zarnecki!

Anyway, that was the first time I'd read Focus, and the last.

ESA & NASA Budget Reductions

Mark Bentley wrote "I guess the problem now is that the US and Europe don't have the budget to go it alone, and so we have to wait for a time when we're both in budgetary sync - or wait for the Chinese :-)"

I read somewhere that budget reductions were likely to impact the near term development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and therefore their plans to return to the moon. Has the same happened with Aurora? I am rather out of the loop with what's happening with that.

At one stage it was supposed to be Europe taking the initiative in sending humans back to the Moon and on to Mars. I suspect this has already been watered down to something much more ordinary.

Anyone have any information?