Recent content by TomMariner

Ya gotta love the over 6,000 Starlink satellites. China is touting its Space Sail to South American countries with 18 birds in orbit.

I LOVE competition -- we always run our best race when the person next to us is pushing hard. Best, this is between two private, commercial organizations, not countries. May both Blue Origins and SpaceX keep innovating. But Blue Origin seems to be learning by putting people up there and NO...

NSF and the University in Florida stole the maintenance money for their pet projects. As others have pointed out -- not just the largest radio telescope that passively receives signals from "out there" -- it is by far the world's most powerful radar, able to bounce massive radio waves off...

Meanwhile, the bright lights at the NFS gave the contract to maintain the Arecibo largest radar unit in the world to a college that stole the money, the broadcast unit fell down, and they decommissioned the thing. US "science" is all politics and who you know. Chinas is where we were 50 years...

Amazing -- SpaceX sees a technology they need and invents and commercializes it. I thought there was a bid out for like a billion dollars from NASA to develop a new space suit. My bet is that the FDA or EPA or FAA will find some reason why these suits cannot become the industry standard.

All four are taking that "spacewalk" -- the whole capsule is depressurized and this ain't as in the movies where a whoosh and the place is depressurized. Anything goes wrong with any of the space suits and it is buh bye! But this is a private first ever mission of SpaceX -- not a government agency.

Almost as if that American Neil Armstrong took "a small step for man a giant step for mankind" more than 50 years ago, we did it five more times, then decided the space bucks could be better used buying other stuff.

I am beginning to think this destruction of everything in orbit is the real aim of these Chinese launches -- in 2007 "The payload was a kinetic kill vehicle (KKV) that collided with a non-operational Chinese weather satellite, the Fengyun-1C (FY-1C), at an altitude of 863 km (534 mi), completely...

Congrats China -- You learned from the US that investing in Space Technology with activities not only makes your science better, but lets the rest of the planet know you are a great place for technical innovation. 60 years ago the US invested big bucks in extravehicular activities which led to...

"the FAA is consulting with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) on an updated Biological Assessment under the Endangered Species Act. " After 40 years, Musk has put us back in the Space business but because he bought Twitter and took away a political platform he must be stopped! The one...

When are we going to stop this splashdown nonsense and have the Dragon land at a gate at LAX and the crew take taxis home?

Wait, isn't SpaceX owned by Elon Musk who is under attack by our government for sending a Tweet saying that the short sellers of Tesla were jerks?

Oh please -- whoever wins the election will do the same thing we have been doing in the fifty years since the Small Step for Man -- buying votes with the money. If we wanted to have anything to do with the future of Space, it would have been done four decades ago and we wouldn't be having this...

China remembers the economic and technical boost that we got 50 years ago when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. We forgot. China's leader is trained as an engineer and supports technology and manufacturing as a path forward. We have five(!) engineers out of our 535 in Congress and play...