Fresh from a tour in the belly of the space beast, Laughing Wolf describes the sad state of NASA at the end of 2003, and offers hope for the future similar to mine.

Clark Lindsey has some good roundups as well.

[Update at 4 PM Central Time (I’m still in Columbia, MO)]

My New Years Fox column is up. As some may have guessed, it’s a reprise of this post. I should issue a correction, since my editor is probably out partying by now and won’t be fixing it any time soon (it’s my fault, not hers–she ran it as submitted, instead of correct). I say that Lockheed is the only remaining provider of large commercial expendable launchers. That should have read, of course, the only domestic one. There are others, in Europe, China and Russia.