Croney and the Bandit (Or Why Space Needs Full Privatization)

This most definitely is opinion. There must be some doubt about the effectiveness of Alabama Senator Richard Shelby’s legislative poison pill against new space launch providers like SpaceX and Orbital. Another attack has been launched, this time against SpaceX’s credibility of how it builds and operates its rockets. The attack comes from three Representatives (we’ll […]

Forget NOAA; NASA’s GRACE Protects You from Floods

Or is that spelled Noah? Anyway, NASA has a pair of 12-year old satellites from their Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE), and it’s NASA’s GRACE that might save you from flooding. The two satellites are orbiting the Earth in a polar Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and are 220 kilometers (140 miles) apart from each other. They […]

Nigeria’s Garbled Space Story

Nigeria is still wrestling with space program issues. On the one hand (and according to this difficult to read post), there seems to be a fundamental lack of knowledge by the general Nigerian population about how satellites work in space. This is no surprise–the Nigerians are dealing with some very real third world survival problems. Even […]

Mining Landfills Made Easier with Satellites

This New Scientist post is quite interesting. It talks about a topic that is a bit unusual: landfill mining. There is at least one company out there right now–Terra Recovery–that’s taking advantage of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Business Incubation Centers to hatch an idea for using satellites for their business. And that business is […]

PSLV: A SpaceX/ULA/Ariane Alternative?

The Indians continue proving they are in the space business for real. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), their success with the Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV), and their continued success with their latest launch today of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center (formerly known as Sriharikota Launching Range), are all […]