Category Archives: Technology and Society

Unconventional Space Access

I’m doing a piece for Popular Mechanics on alternatives to rockets, and I was going to cover rail guns, gas guns, space elevators, sky hooks, and perhaps the launch loop. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

[Update a while later]

Folks, when I say alternatives to rockets, I am including all vehicles that employ chemical rocket engines, including airbreathers. As I said, unconventional.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I’m thinking of three categories: cannons (whether EM, chemical, whatever), external energy (laser, Orion), and momentum exchange (tethers, space elevators, compression towers). I know the latter isn’t really momentum exchange, but it fits sort of. The former don’t work well for passengers, but are well suited to bulk delivery of low-cost stuff (e.g., propellants), and the latter require very high up-front capital costs, in general. With a lot of tech risk.

Old Age

…is it a cause of death?

There will be unintended consequences (good ones, in my opinion) of making it one. It implies that aging is itself a disease, and one that should be fought directly, rather than coming up with palliatives for individual symptoms of it (e.g., hypertension, muscle degeneration, senility, etc.), which would mean that the medical establishment would have to take gerontological research a lot more seriously than it currently does, both in terms of interest and resources. It also flies in the face of the deathist belief that we shouldn’t seek longer life, because it’s not “natural” (the naturalistic fallacy).