USAF General speaks at conference, says nothing new

The Air Force Association held an Air & Space Conference and Technology Exposition last week. This fact came to my attention through this article from DODLive.mil. I understand a conference like this is more of a cheer-leading forum. These can be important, giving management a place to tell their people “this is what’s important.” Opinion starts. […]

Going Dutch

I’ve talked about cubesats before–they’re very inexpensive and let a lot of other people try their different ideas out in orbit. So, aside from SmallSat, the conference in Logan, Utah, others are hosting less ambitious, but just as dedicated meet-ups. Here’s an announcement for one in a restaurant in the Netherlands next Saturday. Sounds quite […]

DigitalGlobe shows Colorado flood imagery

DigitalGlobe has been very active the past few days. Earlier this week, in this aside “Why space matters–especially when it’s close to home,” I noted they were collecting images of the floods. Well, now they’ve posted these images taken during and after the massive floods here in Colorado. There is a short explanation of what’s being […]

Who will be the “ultimate space operator?”

Most people might agree the ultimate space operator is the astronaut (cosmonauts for those Russian fans). But according to this Slate article (posted today), the space operator will be robots. Fair enough. Satellites are a kind of robot, or at the very least, a drone. They have sensors, CPUs, power supplies, etc. Many things akin to […]

More of a good thing

AND THEY’RE OFF!! Now we have two US companies supplying the International Space Station with their own rockets and spacecraft. SpaceRef just posted this article about Orbital’s new rocket and its launch today. Go here for photos of the take-off. And to think we were concerned about a lack of US space launch capability earlier […]