A bipartisan group of 30 House lawmakers is urging President Barack Obama to “chart and clearly state a vision and timeline for the nation in deep-space exploration,” based on the heavy-lift Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule spelled out in authorization and funding legislation for NASA.

Tight budgets and a different threat environment make it both necessary and possible to save taxpayer money on expensive military space hardware, particularly if commercial practices can be applied to some aspects of milspace procurement, according to industry and government representatives who helped draft a new Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) report on the subject.

ORION SLIP: The first spaceflight of NASA’s Orion crew capsule, with an instrumented prototype riding atop a Delta IV Heavy, may not come until December. Originally scheduled for September, the Experimental Test Flight-1 (EFT-1) mission first was first bumped to October by range-scheduling issues at Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla. Now it has slipped to Dec. 4, according to Orion prime Lockheed Martin, with a “protect date” in October in case the logjam clears.

Science, human-exploration and technology managers at NASA are casting a wide net for input into the agency’s proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), issuing a broad area announcement for concept studies that include using commercial space vehicles to capture a near-Earth space rock and deploying secondary payloads as far afield as the moons of Mars for mineral prospecting as well as planetary science.

HOUSTON — Significant cost uncertainty and seemingly optimistic scheduling are just two of the concerns raised over NASA’s proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) by members of the near-Earth object (NEO) community in a new report. The report is the result of the Target NEO 2: Open Community Workshop organized last year in response to the exploration initiative unveiled by the space agency in April 2013.

SOLAR ORBITER: NASA has negotiated a $172.7 million contract with United Launch Services LLC, the contracting arm of United Launch Alliance, to prepare and launch the U.S./European Solar Orbiter Collaboration mission in 2017 on an Atlas V. Under the deal, the company will handle spacecraft processing, payload integration, launch and related services for the mission, which will study the Sun and its outer atmosphere with high-resolution imagery and in-situ measurements in orbit. The mission will use an Atlas V 411 flying from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral.

NASA’s planned Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (Wfirst) would be greatly enhanced with optical systems donated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), although such upgrades will introduce greater complexity and cost, according to a National Research Council (NRC) assessment. Wfirst is a flagship-level mission intended to follow the James Webb Space Telescope for studies of dark energy, planetary architectures of other solar systems and stellar evolution.

Commercial remote-sensing-services provider DigitalGlobe has confirmed that the satellite images it provided to Australian search-and-rescue authorities in the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 were captured on March 16 by its WorldView-2 satellite at a panchromatic resolution of approximately 50 cm. “Working with our customers, DigitalGlobe continues to task our satellites to collect imagery of a wide area that includes the waters around where the possible debris was identified yesterday,” the company said in a March 20 statement.