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]

Sometimes I don't need to justify space exploration - space will just speak for itself (with a little help from NASA) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Jl_qA5I_ycA In a similar vein, I also highly recommend the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) if you haven't seen it before. The daily pictures motivate me each morning... [Read More]

On space.com today, one of these reports is not like the others: http://www.space.com/20449-swiss-private-rocket-plane-2017.html http://www.space.com/20461-russia-moon-robots-missions.html http://www.space.com/20452-scotland-first-satellite-launching-soon.html The first two are articles describing a space mission or technology concept accompanied by a slew of excellent computer-generated graphics, an impressive description and an ambitious timeline. These hyped-up but meat-lacking reports are a strong... [Read More]

If you’ll bear with me, I’ll wrap up my rant about changing the grant system in this post.  Picking up where we left off, here are two more changes that could improve government research funding: a)    Fund the researcher/lab, not the project This change has the same intention as a)... [Read More]