Asteroid Retrieval It has been proposed that NASA go out, grab an asteroid, and bring the asteroid to Earth. It would be placed into high lunar orbit (not directly in Earth orbit). Once there, astronauts can go out to visit it. This would demonstrate key technologies like the solar electric propulsion and the ability to […]
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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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I am sitting in a room at at the Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Apps Challenge. It is late at night, I’m very tired, and there are eight other people in the room: all much younger than me, all college students, all writing software for a game called “Moonville“. It will be a […]
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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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We are living in an awesome generation, the first one that will mine space! Some companies want to mine the Moon. Others want to mine asteroids. Here’s a brief survey of the Who and the Where. At the most recent count, I found eight companies with a focus on space mining. They are at various […]
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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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People sometimes ask me if space industry is “for real”. They want to know if you really can make a profit launching rockets into space, doing exotic activities like deep mining on Mars, bringing back metal ore to Earth, refining it, and selling it on the Earth’s metal markets at a profit. How can that […]
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What is the one most important thing that makes Earth special for life? You are thinking water, and that’s right…but the funny thing is that Earth has hardly any water at all (by solar system standards). Water Wars If the Earth were an apple, you could dip the apple into a bucket of water, pull […]
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What happens when we suddenly have a billion times more of everything? There is a revolution brewing. It’s an economic revolution, like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, but this one is the Space Resources Revolution, and I think it will be the greatest one of all. It will bring the billion-fold greater resources of our […]
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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. […]