Forget about presidential politics for a moment. Forget left and right, Republican and Democrat. Forget the GOP primaries and the same tired old debates that have filled the opinion pages for the last four years.

Instead, to determine the next occupant of the White House, try this question on for size: Would you rather build a moon base or start mining the asteroid belt? Or do you think space exploration should be de-emphasized, and that NASA should be run with the help of the business community?

If you favor the moon base, you’re with Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich. The former speaker, a self-confessed space nerd, made that announcement while campaigning Thursday on Florida’s space coast. “By the end of my second term,” he said, “we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

Former president George W. Bush also directed NASA to aim for a moon base by 2020. (There’s a commercial purpose to this; the moon is likely full of helium-3, a potential energy source for the fusion reactors of the future.) That plan was scrapped by President Obama, who favors sending a manned mission to an asteroid instead.

The asteroid belt is full of minerals such as iron, cobalt and platinum, each worth trillions of dollars Indeed, the worth of a single M-class rock has been conservatively estimated at $10 trillion. Obama wants NASA to put astronauts in that ballpark by 2025.

Both Gingrich and Obama want humans on Mars in the 2030s. Obama wants NASA to take the lead on that, while Gingrich favors cutting the space agency’s budget by 10% and giving that money to the private sector — in the form of a $10 billion prize for the first organization to land on Mars.

And Romney? Gingrich’s rival in the GOP contest has been far less specific about his space plans. But in a recent debate, he suggested his first step would be to have NASA partly funded by commercial interests. “Bring them together, discuss a wide range of options for NASA,” Romney said. “Let’s have a collaborative effort.”

Romney has also said he favors an Apollo-like mission to “excite young people about the potential of space,” but hasn’t said where that mission should go to.

So whose space policy sounds the smartest? Take our poll below, and sound off in the comments.

A severe solar storm has the potential to take down telecommunications and power grids, and the country needs to work on being better prepared, said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lubchenco is also the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.
“This is not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when and how big,” Lubchenco said of the potential for a dangerous solar flare. “We have every reason to expect we’re going to be seeing more space weather in the coming years, and it behooves us to be smart and be prepared.”

The space weather threat is becoming more dire as our sun ramps up toward its period of solar maximum, predicted for around 2013. Activity on the sun fluctuates on a roughly 11-year cycle, and our star has been relatively dormant for a while.

That’s clearly starting to change, though, as evidenced by a class X solar flare – the strongest kind – that erupted from the sun Feb. 14.
“I think the events of this week certainly underscore how important it is for us to be paying attention to space weather and to be prepared to respond to, and mitigate, potential impacts,” Lubchenco said. “As we enter into a period of enhanced solar activity it seems pretty clear that we are going to be looking at the possibility of not only more solar events but also the possibility of some very strong events.”
The Feb. 14 flare unleashed a wave of charged particles that streamed immediately toward Earth, as well as coronal mass ejections, or blobs of plasma, that took days to arrive here. When they did, they interacted with Earth’s magnetic field to cause geomagnetic storms that wiped out radio communications in the Western Pacific Ocean and parts of Asia, and caused airlines to reroute some polar flights to avoid radio outages.

NEXT TIME COULD BE WORSE

However, experts say we got off fairly lucky with this recent solar storm, and that future eruptions could cause worse damage, particularly to the sensitive transformers and capacitors in power grids. If some of these were harmed, there could be power outages for days, weeks, months, or even, in the case of severe damage, years, experts warned.
“It turned out that we were quite well protected this time, so not much happened,” said European Space Agency scientist Juha-Pekka Luntama. “In another case things might have been different.”
Space weather hasn’t posed quite such a threat before, because during the last solar maximum, around 10 years ago, the world wasn’t as dependent on satellite telecommunications, cell phones and global positioning system (GPS) – all technologies that could be disrupted by solar flares.
“Many things we take for granted today are so much more prone to the effects of space weather than was the case during the last maximum,” Lubchenco said. The problem is likely to get even worse as the world could likely become more technologically dependent by the time the next solar maximum rolls around, and the next.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos says it is in talks with European and U.S. partners about creating permanent manned research bases on the moon.

“We don’t want the man to just step on the moon,” Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said in a radio interview Thursday.

“Today, we know enough about it, we know that there is water in its polar areas,” he said, and “we are now discussing how to begin [the moon's] exploration with NASA and the European Space Agency.”

Talk of a base harkens back to Cold War-era plans to create a permanent outpost on the moon, a subject of interest to Soviet and U.S. scientists since the late 1950s, RIA Novosti reported.

Popovkin mentioned two options, to “either to set up a base on the moon or to launch a station to orbit around it.”

Russia is proceeding with plans to send two unmanned missions to the moon by 2020, the Luna Glob and the Luna Resource.

Thanks to some Tweeter happy astronauts and a new camera technology that was able to shoot high-resolution photos even as the station moved at a rapid 17,500 miles an hour some 240 miles above Earth’s surface.

The amazing photo tweets were first noticed in 2010 by author L. Douglas Keeney.  He went through 300,000 NASA images and chose the best 400 photos for his book Lights of Mankind: The Earth at Night as Seen from Space.

Here are just a few of them.  Enjoy!

Read more here.

The U.S. Air Force’s top secret X-37B space plane may be spying on China, according to a report in Spaceflight magazine.
The unmanned craft was launched into Earth’s orbit 10 months ago, but the Air Force has kept quiet on its mystery mission, where it’s been, and when it will return. Faithful onlookers now believe the space plane might be snooping on China’s new space station, Tiangong-1 — after discovering how closely their orbits matched.

The U.S. Air Force launched the robotic X-37B space plane in early 2010 on a space mission that remains a secret — even after the craft touched ground 225 days later at Vandenberg Air Force Base. In early 2011, the ship took off again on its latest mission.

“Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China’s nascent space station,” Spaceflight Editor Dr. David Baker told the BBC.
Built by Boeing’s Phantom Works division, the 29-foot-long X-37B spacecraft was originally developed by NASA in 1999 before it was eventually taken over and classified by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The robot craft’s official purpose is to test new spaceflight technologies but there has been speculation about X-37B’s potential military capabilities with Iran’s PressTV calling the vehicle a “secret space warplane” — an opinion partly echoed by Brian Weeden, a technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the U.S. Air Force.
Weeden suspects that the X-37B may be testing out gear for the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency that builds and operates the U.S.’s spy satellites — which would explain the secrecy.
“As we know through experience, everything and anything about them [the NRO] is classified,” Weeden told Space.com early last year.
The space plane, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle-2, was boosted into Earth orbit atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 5, 2011, and amateur skywatchers have been keenly tracking it ever since.
“The parallels with X-37B [and Tiangong-1] are clear,” Baker said in this month’s Spaceflight. “With a period differential of about 19 seconds, the two vehicles will migrate toward or against each other, converging or diverging, roughly every 170 orbits.”
But Weeden and others believe the orbital similarities between the two could be a red herring.
“A typical spy satellite is in a polar orbit, which gives you access to the whole Earth,” Weeden told the BBC.
“The X-37B is in a much lower inclination which means it can only see a very narrow band of latitudes — and the only thing that’s of real interest in that band is the Middle East and Afghanistan.”