Money, money, money in an OECD nation's world...

Space Politics is getting excited about the apparent solution to Europe's problems with its financing and industrial workshare arrangement for its Galileo satellite navigation system. He also manages to find the usual ill-informed, biased, rubbish reporting in The Times newspaper that we in the UK have to suffer about anything that has the word European in it.

Talking of dosh, Personal Spaceflight is following the local New Mexico tax story and its role in the development of that state's Spaceport America.

We did follow this issue until the NM legislature decided to change its own rules and give itself $33 million to get the work started and after that the county referendums for local spaceport related taxes no longer had the potency they once had

Ex-NM economic development secretary and also ex-Spaceport Authority executive director Rick Homans once admitted to me that they had got the environmental impact timetable wrong and that led to the delay they were seeing in getting the spaceport licence; although he denied that they had abandoned the three funding criteria as I had reported, but that's another story

Talking of politics, at the Cosmic Log blog MSNBC's Alan Boyle chews over Democratic party hopefull Barak Obama's alleged comments about his education policy and NASA's budget

Coming back to Space Politics, it is also thinking about the use of bogeyman China to scare Congress into boosting NASA's funding. It is true that US space advocates have leapt on NASA administrator Michael Griffin's comments about China beating the US back to the Moon. But sadly for them China is not playing ball and Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration, has apparently denied that the country has any plans or timetable to send astronauts to the Moon. No surprise for me

Talking of geopolitics and the cut and thrust of diplomacy, Aviation Week finds the facts in the somewhat dry and less than exciting world of radio frequency management

And at the same time Aviation Week's Frank Morring gives the low down on the preparations for the arrival of the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory at the International Space Station involving the European built Harmony module.

Following on from yesterday's Mars mission stuff, try this video about a Variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMIR) propelled flight to the Red Planet