If it weren’t clear already, I am very optimistic about the future of the private space industry.  I’ve had many conversations with pessimists on private space - those who simply doubt feasibility generally bring up two major problems:  Problem 1: Most of the NewSpace companies popping up everywhere can’t possibly... [Read More]

Saturday Space Stories! I worry this won't be useful until we can have non-astronauts on the space station</p> Darpa Robots for Darpa cars! CONSISTENCY: Is NASA supposed to do hard things or boringly feasible things? I say the former. The whole point of NASA is that they have padding for... [Read More]

In a conversation the other day, the argument came up that most people aren’t excited about space because it doesn’t affect their lives directly. Sure, people are a lot more excited about the next big movie or phone, but take a look at a lot of the big exciting projects... [Read More]

Space flight needs a paradigm shift. Pessimists on the extent of our ability to become a spacefaring species point to how even with the best rockets that could theoretically exist, it would still be prohibitively expensive to go to space.  I don’t disagree with their math or their conclusions…given their... [Read More]

A few more thoughts on historiography following yesterday’s post:  I’ve come to realize that the history of anything, no matter how simple, never has just a single thread - it's a thickly bundled rope. Any one narrative can only observe a few threads of that rope at once. When you... [Read More]