Category Archives: Technology and Society

At Smallsat

This is my first trip to this venerable conference, which for decades was held in Logan, UT, where the university there, Utah State, was a hotbed of this developing technology as a result of innovative faculty. This year it’s at the convention center in Salt Lake City, and it’s huge, as would befit this burgeoning industry. There’s a cavernous exhibit hall with hundreds of exhibitors.

My concern is that the industry may be in a bubble. I’m seeing several vendors for some of the technologies, and it’s not clear to me that they’ll all survive, or how they’ll compete. But that’s the dynamic nature of new tech.

Trump’s Second-Term Space Policy

Yes, it’s an ongoing mess.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Yes, putting a nuclear reactor (in fact, several of them) on the Moon is a great idea, but it’s out of context with the policy mess. If we want to put reactors on the Moon, we have to come up with a scalable, affordable transportation infrastructure to get not only them, but lots of things there. We don’t currently have one, and no one in the administration seems to be concerned about it.