You know why I’m most excited about President Obama’s proposed budget for NASA? High-powered technology research programs. Hey, our space program really ought to be synonymous with high tech!

At an industry forum today hosted by NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist, several new research programs, open challenges, and collaborative initiatives got rolled out – and my research group’s projects were, literally, a poster child for NASA!

In this presentation on small spacecraft technologies, you can see a picture of Cornell’s CUSat spacecraft on page 5…concept pictures and graphs that I developed for my flux-pinned spacecraft project on pages 7 and 15…a picture of me in front of the Zero-G aircraft in page 15, along with a picture of my labmates with our equipment in microgravity…and the citation slide lists this post on my blog.

I’m thrilled – as a guy who’s passionate about space exploration and passionate about combining weird physics and radical engineering to make sci-fi technologies into reality, I’m really psyched to see innovative programs like NIAC come back from their funding graves and a new NASA focus on enabling technologies that will help make our space exploration dreams into exciting realities.

Time for space enthusiasts to lobby hard for the new budget on Capitol Hill!