Leading NASA
In the two months since Michael Griffin resigned as NASA Administrator a successor has yet to be named. While NASA is in competent hands under the interim direction of Chris Scolese we all understand the dynamics of being a “lame duck” especially in the political swirl of the Federal...
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...
The North Korean Threat:: Bringing Terrorism to Space
The dynamic of world politics, people and cultures is indeed fascinating. We spend a significant amount of time trying to understand the vast diversity of living creatures on this planet, but don’t seem to spend near enough time trying to figure out how we ended up with such a...
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...
This Day in Space History
January 27th is a day of remembrance in the annals of space history and a day to reflect on those that were lost in the conquest of space. On this date ten astronauts gave their lives in mankind’s reach for the heavens. In 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White and...
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...
On This Christmas Eve
Forty years ago tonight America was bringing to a close a year that saw much turmoil and unrest. America’s survival through the problems at home and abroad that marked the sixties was tested as we struggled to find ourselves through the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,...
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...