About Us

SpacePolicyOnline.com provides news, information and analysis about the policy aspects of the full scope of the U.S. space program -- civil (NASA, NOAA, FAA/OCST, and other civil agencies), military (DOD and the intelligence community), and commercial -- as well as international space activities and space law.  Many excellent websites already exist about NASA's space activities, but the space program is much more than NASA.

Marcia S. Smith is the founder and editor of SpacePolicyOnline.com. She has almost four decades of experience in space policy, including 31 years at the Congressional Research Service on Capitol Hill (1975-2006), and three at the National Research Council's Space Studies Board and Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (2006-2009). She is the North American Editor of the journal Space Policy, and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the American Astronautical Society (AAS). Here are links to a one-page biography and a complete list of her publications since 1973.

Laura M. Delgado Lopez joined SpacePolicyOnline.com as a correspondent in September 2009. In May 2011, Ms. Delgado completed an M.A. in International Science and Technology Policy from the George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, where she was a 2009 Harry S. Truman Scholar and a Northrop Grumman Fellow. Also in May 2011, Ms. Delgado joined the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies as the Earth Observations Associate. She also held a position as a researcher with Project Ploughshares's Space Security Index 2011 and in 2010 interned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Space Initiatives division). Ms. Delgado's previous experiences include positions at the Space Studies Board of the National Academies, at the NAIC-Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and in the Office of then-Congressman Luis Fortuño (now governor of Puerto Rico). Ms. Delgado graduated Summa Cum Laude with a bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of Puerto Rico. Her research interests include international relations theory as applied to space policy, Earth observations, space developments in Latin America and space security.