I recently came across a letter written by Ernst Stuhlinger in 1970.   It’s a fairly long letter, but provides some good arguments for space exploration. What stood out in my mind was this  (possibly fictional) story: “About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany.... [Read More]

Distracted by a could-not-be-more-beautiful day, I forgot to put up a "May the Fourth be with you" post. Like the Jedi, my negligence has given rise to The Revenge of the Fifth! If your nerd quotient is not dangerously high enough to have seen these before, here are some very... [Read More]

I’ve been very busy, so today’s posts is a couple of links following up on previous posts as well as some shameless self-promotion. In addition to my thoughts on the matter, here are some further arguments about why we need to be sending people and not robots to mars. In... [Read More]

It looks like NASA will be getting funding for a proposed mission to capture an asteroid.  Space.com reports on it here. I think the concept is very cool, and probably feasible given enough money.  However, I’m going to have to bet against the project making actual headway due to the... [Read More]

It looks like Russia and the European Union are hopping on the “send robots to putter around Mars looking for life” bandwagon. I don’t want to malign the technological advances spurred by these projects. If you have doubts, consider that they actually pulled off this plan without a hitch.  I... [Read More]