Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

No, Veronique

45 Comments

The moon is not Antarctica.

Many of the “rocks have rights” crowd would like it to be, though. One of the problems with the Outer Space Treaty was that it was modeled on the Antarctic Treaty.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, Paul, please:

With launch costs of thousands of dollars per pound (and unlikely to come down significantly for the foreseeable future)

They are likely to come down to hundreds, or tens of dollars per pound within a decade, now that we have some actual competition and innovation happening in the industry.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space

My Book Interview

5 Comments

It’s available on Youtube now.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s one of the brilliant comments over there:

he just sounds like a typical neo con who would prefer to send cheap chinese labor into space rather than waste money on returning white men to their families.
same type who wants more young americans to die for israel.

This is a sign of a broken brain.

BTW, fun fact. That picture of the book? It’s virtual, created by PJTV. It doesn’t yet exist in physical form, but it should next week, and it should look exactly like that.

Media Criticism, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Hazardous Asteroids

29 Comments

…may be more common than we thought:

The scientific orthodoxy said that a Chelyabinsk-size event ought to happen every 140 years or so, but Brown saw several such events in the historical record.

Famously, a large object exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908. But there have been less-heralded impacts, including one on Aug. 3, 1963, when an asteroid created a powerful airburst off the coast of South Africa.

“Any one of these taken separately I think you can dismiss as a one-off. But now when we look at it as a whole, over a hundred years, we see these large impactors more frequently than we would expect,” said Brown, whose paper appeared in Nature.

But our response, and actions to become a space-faring civilization, remains pathetic.