The most memorable ones from Ashlee Vance’s new book
Category Archives: Space
You Can’t Take The Sky From Me
As I promised yesterday, my thoughts on social justice in space are up at PJMedia.
[Update a few minutes later]
[Mid-morning update]
Mars needs Kirk, not Hofstadter.
But it’s Martin Robbins, not “Roberts.”
The First Woman To Be Raped In Space
As Glenn notes, this seems to be gender feminism’s major contribution to spaceflight.
I ruffled some feathers this weekend at Space Access by having the temerity to point out that there will be some people who will oppose our expansion into space, because they don’t trust us to do it “right,” and with “social justice.” So much will they oppose it that they may even get violent about it. They do, after all, call themselves “warriors,” and they use a lot of eliminationist rhetoric, like “Smash patriarchy.” I got an email or two about it.
My quick take: Saying that I am “picking a fight” with these people is like saying that the New York Times was picking a fight with the Japanese by reporting that they had bombed Pearl Harbor. As I noted in my talk, they went after the gamers, and the SF community. They’re already on their way to go after the space settlers, as the above linked piece indicates.
I’ll have a longer take at Ricochet or PJMedia.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sort of related: Why Joss Whedon left Twitter.
[Update a while later]
Here’s one hot off the press (Monday) from D. N. Lee (the Scientific American blogger whose tweet I highlighted in my talk). This is much more mild than the tweet, but it gives you an idea of what we’re up against.
Regenerative Life Support
Listening to an interesting presentation on challenges of closing the cycle on ISS, particularly water. Not seeing any real surprises, but I think that this will be a very useful result of having the station for improving systems. They’re learning about life of various system elements, and getting some surprises, with some failure years before expected, and some lasting much longer.
3-D Printing In Space Using ISRU
That’s the topic of the talk coming up from Dennis Wingo at the Improving Space Operations Workshop. I follow him.
Pad Abort Test
Congratulations to SpaceX. From what I’m seeing on my Twitter feed, it went off without a hitch.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the video.
[Update a while later]
Here‘s Michael Belfiore’s report.
Improving Space Operations
It’s Day 2 of the workshop. I’m giving a talk this morning on the need for resilient LEO infrastructure. I may post the briefing later. It’s substantially the same one I gave to NASA at HQ in December.
Lunar Operations
Interesting session at the Improving Space Ops Workshop in Pasadena. Heard a talk on long-lived stable lunar orbits with max eclipse time of four hours. Now listening to a proposed cubesat mission to map hydrogen at the lunar poles.
Improving Space Operations
There’s a workshop at JPL today and tomorrow (I’m doing a presentation there tomorrow morning), so blogging will probably be light or non-existent.
[Update a few minutes before I leave]
The Humans2Mars conference starts today in DC. There is so much stuff going on in space that it’s hard to cover it all in person, even if I had the travel resources. Follow @jeff_foust and Pat Host (@Pat_DefDaily). It’s also live streaming.
[Update before I’m out the door to Pasadena]
Humans2Mars has issued its first annual report. That’s the first I’d heard that Mike Raftery had left Boeing.
Misdirection On Mars
Bob Zubrin says we don’t need no stinkin’ moon. Or SLS, either.
I don’t agree with his proposal, but it’s a lot better than anything that NASA has put forward.