I’m a big fan of using things for purposes other than those intended by their creators. I’ve used Legos as a reconfigurable experimental setup, a firecracker case as an electronic Palantir, and cardboard for pretty much everything except packing things (ok, I’ve used it to pack things too.) People repurposing is... [Read More]

Considering how prevalent it is, converting analog data (ie. the real world) to digital form is a piece of our technological portfolio that is still surprisingly difficult to get right.  As much as some CS majors may like to ignore it, computers that interact with the real world need to... [Read More]

As a side effect of spending a lot of time yakking about the future of space exploration, I encounter many pessimistic outlooks on private space flight. One of those most common explanations for this pessimism is: “Most of the NewSpace companies popping up everywhere are crazy and can’t possibly survive.”... [Read More]

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]