As usual, Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed. Neither am I.
Category Archives: Space
Save The Far Side!
This seems a little overblown to me, certainly currently.
I agree that it’s a special place in terms of radio silence, and would be a great location for very large radiotelescopes. But I don’t know many people who would want to live there, and never see the home planet. And they could do comm via lasers — no need to pollute the local “air” waves with spurious RF communications.
Bezos’s Nude Pics
Is it a crime to threaten to publish them? Thoughts from (First-Amendment Professor) Eugene Volokh.
The Stainless-Steel Spaceship
…explained.
Space Resources
A bill has been introduced to have NASA establish a new institute to study them.
Raptor Update
They did a full-thrust test last night in Texas.
"Metric tons of force"? Don't you mean maganewtons?
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) February 7, 2019
This program is moving along at a crazy pace. I wonder how close they are to installing them in the hopper?
Armageddon
No, they’re not going to “knock the asteroid out of orbit.” They’re going to knock it into a different orbit.
SLS
Eric Berger has the latest on the ongoing wasteful programmatic disaster.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, a French auditor says that Ariane 6 is “too conventional” to compete with SpaceX. I’ve been saying for years that it will be obsolete before it flies.
Location For A Mars Colony?
Bob Zimmerman (who is doing his annual fundraising drive) has found a fascinating cave.
Space Settlement Straw Man
I don’t know whether this guy’s ideas for carbon capture make economic sense or not, but this I see a lot of this sort of nonsense:
You quote the Jesuit philosopher Thomas Berry, who writes about our being inseparable from the Earth. That’s not trending in Silicon Valley the way, say, terraforming Mars is.
What the hell do we do when we’ve trashed the hell out of Earth? We escape to another planet! That appears to be the attitude from the tech-os. Well, I find that hugely irresponsible. Why waste billions on going to Mars when we should be putting that into nourishing Earth? It’s your classic mechanical mind gone to the extreme, and I find it abhorrent from people that are meant to be intelligent. We are an integral part of Earth and until we start nurturing her, we are going to go down the gurgler. Maybe a few of those tech-os will end up on a spaceship, but the rest of us won’t.
I don’t know anyone who wants to escape to another planet because we’ve trashed the earth.