Learning a Lesson: The Colbert Conundrum
NASA is learning the power of the internet and social computing – the hard way. NASA has one of the better sites on the web with a good design with a wealth of news, feeds, archival data, and multimedia to be experienced and enjoyed by all followers of the...
NASA Gets It Right
The successful launch of Discovery on Sunday March 15th after weeks of delays and the safe landing on Saturday March 28th was a clear demonstration of NASA “getting it right”. When you have a program that has the highest visibility and you suffer not one, but two tragedies that...
NASA Vision Keeps Going
When President Barack Obama indicated in his speech Tuesday night that everyone would have to make sacrifices and everyone’s favorite programs would have to take hits it sent shudders through the space community. Despite frequently relying on analogies related to the space program as examples of what America can...
Minefields in Space
The recent collision between an active American Iridium communications satellite and the inactive Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite illustrates that for as big as space is it isn’t big enough for satellites to roam freely in low Earth orbit without rules governing the use of “occupied” space. No one is...
The Iranian Sputnik
With the announcement that Iran launched its own satellite last night came renewed suspicion that its intentions in space are less than honorable. In a closed society such as Iran one can never know if the public portrayal of national pride resulting from putting a small satellite into orbit...
Energiya-Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle
I recently completed reading the book “Energiya-Buran: The Story of the Soviet Space Shuttle”. First, my kudos to the authors Bart Hendrickx and Bert Vis as well as Praxis for publishing a book with such a wealth of detail about a subject that only ten or so years ago...
Combining Forces: NASA and the Military
A trial balloon recently floated by incoming President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team raised the possibility of combining the U.S. military’s space capability and funding with NASA’s. An intriguing option that raises numerous possibilities that could help advance the civilian and military uses of space, but one that also warrants...
No Giant Leaps for ESA (European Space Agency)
The thought of manned space exploration conjures many emotions from the initial “can we do this?” in the late fifties and early sixties to the space race to the landing on the moon and how we’ve progressed since that July day in 1969. On one hand those that are...
Happy 10th Birthday International Space Station!
The ISS turned ten today and isn’t it truly amazing how time has flown by. In those ten years the station has covered just enough miles in space to have gone to Saturn and back. The station has grown from that first module to the largest man-made object ever...
Retire the Shuttle?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes. I don’t like the answer any more than most Americans. The thought that we’ll be without this magnificent machine and that the remaining fleet of Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour will be relegated to static displays in a museum would signal the end of an...