An aside from historian-hat-wearing Ben:  Today on Quora I came across a thought-provoking paragraph. My reaction to it went something like this: “The idea that ‘history is written by the winners’ is a clichéd truism that isn't actually very true.” This could be insightful – go on…  “History is actually... [Read More]

Two news items today focus on the “privatization” of government space resources - parts of the ISS and Cape Canaveral. I feel like these developments fall into the category of “actions that have a label that sounds good in principle, but doesn't really have a benefit in practice.” It’s similar... [Read More]

I'm kind of rushed and sick but I wanted to leave this tidbit to brain-chew: People are terrible at comparing things that are greater than two orders of magnitude apart. You can visualize $1 vs $10 vs $100 but try thinking about how much bigger $2000 is than $1 and... [Read More]

Saturday Space Stories! People just don't hate the government like they used to  More inverted pendulum awesomness While actually returning something from Mars will be awesome, couldn’t a rover do something more useful for science and human space exploration than play the same old ‘life on mars’ tune?  I'm a... [Read More]

Some big space news items this week are the NASA authorization bill from the House Space Subcommittee and subsequent debate over the proposed asteroid mission, as well as the political fallout from the Proton rocket crash. Both of these stories beg the question: is there a reason that space exploration... [Read More]