Category Archives: Space

Moon Metals

An interesting new discovery by LRO:

“If this hypothesis is true, only the first few hundred meters of the moon’s surface possesses little iron and titanium oxides, according to NASA. ‘But below the surface, there’s a steady increase to a rich and unexpected bonanza,’ it said.”

At the Space Settlement Summit last fall in Pasadena, a Canadian mining engineer berated the assembled for lack of seriousness when it comes to lunar resources. “You have no idea what’s under that dust,” he said, “and you won’t until you get up there and start drilling.” I thanked him for the comment, noting that for people who claim to want to develop the solar system, we think really small, likely from hanging out with NASA too much.

Crew Dragon

Its solar panels are generating much more power than expected.

Well, that’s nice.

[Tuesday-morning update]

NASA is very happy with the Crew Dragon performance so far.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is moving from stage-production mode to fleet-management mode.

Only four cores doesn’t seem like enough to me. One of the reasons we retired Shuttle was that we had too small a fleet with only three. But SpaceX can build more.

[Bumped]

The Latest Misanthropy

I posted this on Twitter, but not here. But Glenn picked it up.

[June 26th update]

Bob Zubrin has read the book, so we didn’t have to. His review is sort of…excoriating.

[Bumped]

Persecution Is Cool

Bob Zimmerman, on the cancel culture within the space and science community.

Keith has blocked me on Twitter, and I suspect I’m on a lot of blocklists. I follow a lot of space people, like Carolyn, but only engage them on space and science topics. I don’t argue non-space politics with space people, because many of them are leftist loons, which is why I maintain separate accounts for space stuff and the book.

[Update Wednesday morning]

The Great Awokening.