Merry Christmas To All

Even to those who take offense at being wished a merry Christmas. I’m not a Christian, or believer in general, but neither am I one of the too many godless who demonize them.

Given the events of the past several weeks, it has to be a very sad Christmas in the place of Christ’s birth. The home of someone who came to bring peace remains roiled in a brutal war, fought against savage people who, if they ever got the power to eliminate those people from whom He was descended, would next take on the rest of us infidels.

With what’s happening in Ukraine and Israel, it’s perhaps one of the most somber holidays in almost eight decades, but we should rejoice that those of us in America remain at peace for now, and offer our thoughts and hopes and (if you do that) prayers to those who are suffering not just on this day, but for all days.

AIAA SciTech

As you can see in the left sidebar, I’m planning to attend next month in Orlando. They used to be in San Diego, and I haven’t been to one since before the pandemic. ASCEND was a huge upgrade over their previous annual space conference, and I’m curious to see how much SciTech has changed in the past few years.

As you can see from the program, it has a wide variety of papers on not just space (my primary interest, as always), but aviation as well. The number of simultaneous topics is overwhelming (as it has been in the past), but I’ll be interested primarily in sessions on space resources, space assembly and servicing, life support for larger facilities, nuclear propulsion (both electric and thermal), human logistics in space and space medicine, advances in additive manufacturing, AI applications and, of course space policy. I’ll also be discussing my own participation in the Cislunar Ecosystem Task Force, which was first announced at this event a year ago.

I don’t know if there will be any news broken there, but if there is, I’ll be blogging about it here. I won’t be attending Friday, because I have to be in DC. But I will be there Monday through Thursday, and I hope I’ll see some of you there.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!