The search is on:

In a celestial version of finding a needle in a haystack, Howes and his team are about to embark on the seemingly impossible: finding Snoopy!

After consulting members of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Faulkes Telescope team, who are working with the Space Exploration Engineering Corp and astronomers from the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy as well as schools across the UK, the team are under no illusion of how difficult the task will be as Paul Roche, Director of the Faulkes Telescope Project states: “To paraphrase President Kennedy, we are trying these things ‘not because they are easy but because they are hard’ — this will be a real test for the hardware and the people involved.”

The challenges facing the team are enormous, a fact that isn’t lost on Howes. “The key problem which we are taking on is a lack of solid orbital data since 1969,” he told Discovery News. “We’ve enlisted the help of the Space Exploration Engineering Corp who have calculated orbits for Apollo 13 and working closely with people who were on the Apollo mission team in the era will help us identify search coordinates.”

Here’s an interesting project. Have Paul Allen or someone put up a prize to not just find it, but to retrieve it, and put it on the lunar surface as part of the lunar Apollo historical sites. It’s the kind of thing we’d do if we were really a space-faring nation. And we will never do it with anything like an SLS.

Traditionally, though it’s not a written rule, vice presidents have been in charge of space policy, though some are more so than others. Johnson was very much so, Agnew was somewhat, Ford and Rockefeller not much, Mondale tried to kill the Shuttle and succeeded in reducing the fleet size, GHW Bush wasn’t particularly involved as far as I recall, but Quayle was considerably, as was Gore. Sean O’Keefe was supposedly a friend of Dick Cheney’s, being groomed for bigger things when he was tapped as NASA administrator.

So I was over at Barnes & Noble, and picked up a copy of Cheney’s new book, and turned to the index. Mentions of O’Keefe? None. Mentions of the moon? None. Mentions of the Vision for Space Exploration? None. Mentions of NASA? None.

Come to think of it, I didn’t do a search for “Shuttle” or “Columbia,” but it’s hard to see how they would have been mentioned without mentioning NASA or O’Keefe. Basically, it wasn’t important enough to him to discuss it in a several-hundred-page book.

I would also note that, thankfully, Joe Biden doesn’t seem to be involved with space policy.