Category Archives: Science And Society

Lunar Resources

Is there a conflict between science and sustainability?

Meanwhile, there is a symposium on space settlement in DC today. You can follow the livestream.

[Late-afternoon update]

I know this is what you’ve all been waiting for: The Slate article about this crap.

Though most of the symposium was actually useful and interesting, ignoring the nonsense about colonialism in North America.

The First Moon Landing

What most people don’t know about it.

As I’ve noted for years, the reason that we haven’t been able to do Apollo again is that we just barely did it the first time, and it’s extremely unlikely that the stars will align to allow it to happen again. And that is as it should be, for America. There was a very powerful sense in which Apollo was not the right thing for a country based on entrepreneurialism and free enterprise to be doing.

I’m reading Roger Launius’s new book, in which he talks about four perspectives of Apollo. I noted to him privately that there was a fifth, that he didn’t address:

I felt a little left out. I think I represent a fifth perspective, in that I believe that Apollo was both necessary and not a waste of money for what it accomplished (a major non-military victory in the Cold War), but that it set us back in human spaceflight for decades (and continues to do so, as witness the current ongong Artemis fiasco).

He didn’t disagree.