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Moon Landings and Breaking into Cars: Solving Unsolvable Problems

I don’t believe there are any unsolvable problems.  In my job I’m often asked to solve things that seem impossible, but every time it takes just a little creative thinking to overturn the paradigm and solve it.  I want to tell you a funny story that really happened to me a few years ago, one […]

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How to Make Space Industry Profitable

From a certain point of view, California remained an “unprofitable” part of the world for hundreds of years after the Westerners arrived in the early 1500’s.  It was a long distance to ship anything around the southern tip of South America from California to the Eastern U.S.  There was little industry to produce things in […]

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How to Colonize the Solar System in Six Easy Steps

About three years ago, my colleague Rob Mueller asked me if I had an idea for a technical paper we could write for the International Astronautical Congress in Prague, the Czech Republic.  I did, in fact, have a topic that was beginning to fascinate me. I had been looking at pictures from Titan, Saturn’s largest […]

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Some time ago, our ancestors discovered that the Earth isn’t quite as flat as it seems.  Nowadays the mathematicians will tell us that it has “positive curvature.”  Well, it might be positive, but it’s not that positive.  It’s hardly curved at all.  You can’t notice it when driving your car to the grocery store, for instance.  […]