A busy day at Ames continued to drive home the point that NASA has too many random cool projects for anybody to actually keep track of.  Did you know that there are people working on: Bacteria that can extract resources from lunar regolith? Self-diagnostic spacecraft systems? Self-flying helicopters? Actually easy-to-use... [Read More]

In completely unrelated news, I wrote a quick essay for a contest at work on the prompt "If you could have a superpower for a day, what would it be?" Since it ate my blog-post-writing-time, I thought I would offer it up as sacrifice instead:  Full essay below the break.... [Read More]

This article about the European Space Agency’s attempts at making a reusable space plane brings up two big issues. I don’t have time to go into depth about them now, but it’s still worthwhile to bring them to the surface:  Competition between companies is useful and makes sense – driving... [Read More]

More Shameless Research Plugs I go into a bit more detail on my summer research over at the SSDS blog.

Please excuse the mildly philosophical thought experiment:  Imagine a giant tree that was planted many years ago in an empty meadow.  This tree provides many things – fruit, shade, and beauty to name a few – that almost anybody you ask would agree makes it superior to the empty field.... [Read More]