To boldly go beyond Earth’s orbital neighborhood is the next level of courageous, crewed exploration. To make it to that step, we’ll need a spaceship purpose-built with the idea that that crew will be gone for protracted amounts of time and will likely set up camp somewhere else. Continue reading
“Our space program is one of the things that makes us great, that sets us far apart from other productive countries, that makes us respectable, that makes our advice worth listening to.” I was going to write a blog entry … Continue reading
I agree with the idea that we need a new way to name celestial bodies that helps the public feel a bit more in touch with the cosmos. We have two major problems with that now: the vast number of objects, and the limited number of thematic names we’ve traditionally used. Continue reading
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) recently issued an RFI to support a project to last at least 100 years concerning building a spacecraft able to reach a nearby star. Naturally, this sparked my imagination to wonder what it would … Continue reading
The Review of Human Spaceflight Plans Committee’s 154-page report was delivered on October 22. While it was an honest assessment of NASA’s woes, it’s recommendations were almost laughable. Continue reading
It took almost thirty years, but the inevitable war of attrition finally resulted in Skynet breaking the fighting will of the humans. The cost to robotics was high but proved to be sustainable in the end. Skynet can finally relax. To what end? With the war over, what’s next on Skynet’s agenda? Continue reading
Today, I was standing in line at the store. There were a few people behind me, and one pair was talking. One of them started a sentence with, “If we can send a man to the Moon…” Argh. Oh, how I hate hearing that phrase. I didn’t used to, twenty-to-thirty years ago. Continue reading
