The penalty that everyone said was too painful to occur is now happening, with Congress's failure to pass a deal to prevent nearly $1 trillion in government spending cuts over a decade. Now the question is how long the pain will last.

The White House is adopting a tough public relations campaign against China and other online hackers believed to be carrying out what has been described as the greatest theft of intellectual property in history. On Feb.

Weighing potential of smaller, more plentiful satellites

In Washington nobody likes to talk about the “s-word” but as March 1, the deadline for the across-the-board budget cuts grows closer, conversations about sequestration are becoming all-consuming. “It is just occupying everyone's time,” says Pentagon industrial base chief Brett Lambert. Unless lawmakers pass a new agreement by the end of the month, $85 billion in across-the-board budget reductions will take place for fiscal 2013. It is the first increment in a 10-year, nearly $1 trillion package of spending cuts.

Selling data from a piggyback payload

NASA's open-ended space technology push is receiving a bureaucratic boost with the creation of a new Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency's Washington headquarters, joining Aeronautics, Human Exploration and Operations and Science as associate-administrator-level organizations. The new Space Technology associate administrator will be Michael Gazarik (at left in this photo with Deputy Administrator Lori Garver at Aurora Flight Sciences), formerly director of the Space Technology Program in the Office of the Chief Technologist.