Yes my friend, I am a space farmer. I grow zero-gravity crystals, harvest helium-3 from the moon's surface, and extract drinking water from asteroids, all for the benefit of mankind. I am a space farmer.
If you loved the old look of the blog, apologies in advance.
If you’re new or newish, hopefully this isn’t too hard on the eyes.
The configuration control board will attempt to document the current layout better than the old one. All I could remember was two columns with a header…
Readers may be interested to learn that the National Space Studies Center is now on Twitter (and Facebook, by the way). Twitter users can find us by searching ‘TheNSSC’ on Twitter and clicking ‘Follow’ – we promise to follow you back. Those of you not on Twitter should know that there are 90 years left of the 21st century, isn’t it time you got with it Dadd-i-o?
The uses and impact of Google Earth, says Foreign Policy, goes beyond finding Tom Cruise’s palatial estate. For example, using Google Earth, you can be your own intel shop to highlight border disputes, global warming (er, climate change), humanitarian crises, marijuana forests, and well, palatial estates in the Tragic Kingdom.
The thrust of the article, a series of six slides and associated narrative, is that the plethora of information Google Earth provides has created both problems and opportunities. (more…)
While Michael Rennie was there the day the earth stood still and he told us where to stand, Stephen Hawking has another take: abandon the planet.
Life ending nuclear war, global warming, and the sun’s expansion all strike Hawking as good reasons to look towards places other than earth as possible future destinations.
On the other hand, there are those who think the earth will be pretty tough to destroy.
An alternative would be to develop methods that are capable of taking each person’s consciousness and put it into an android, which would give us a lot better chance of surviving the space radiation associated with the 50,000 year ride (using current technologies) to the nearest star.
Got Space?
The answer to the Washington Post headline is, of course, money.
Whatever the problem(s), to include NASA’s, chances are good it can be fixed with time and money.
However, an essential task of leadership is establishing priorities. After all, when everything is priority one, nothing is priority one. This is because there is always more people want done than there is time and money to do. So the issue becomes ‘what are we going to do and what are we going to (by choice) not do?’
It’s interesting NASA has become a political and funding football largely because (IMHO) there is no well understood (or agreed on) mission, vision, and strategy. Oh, those things exist on paper, but are they reconciled between NASA, the Congress, and the administration?
The comments trailing the article are telling. They tend to fall into one of three bins:
1) Conspiracy theory. NASA’s dilemma is a plot to cause them to fail for the purpose of draconian space cuts in the future.
2) Appeal to goodness. Full funding for NASA’s manned space efforts because…well, it’s important!
3) Space isn’t all that. Unemployment, deficit spending, and other domestic problems should serve to push NASA’s problems off the funding screen.
Of course, there should be great synergy between military space, civil space, and commercial space. Instead, we have funding disconnects, excess capacity, conflicting visions and goals.
Keep doing what you’re doing, keep getting what you got.
As a friendly reminder, the official National Space Studies Center website remains in its historical location here.
A recent add to the site is a page full of links to the op-eds we’ve written, going back to early 2008. Trying to find those articles via google (they are also archived on the archive site for Air University’s The Wright Stuff) seems to be next to impossible.
Enjoy!
Songs of Space & Nuclear War 