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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

Civilization has known war and conflict all throughout its history. The Second World War gave birth to the space age, but long before that battle humans gazed at the sky and dreamed of what existed beyond the reaches of Earth while on the ground the use of rockets was...