February 1, 2019: Weekly Spatial Resolutions

CIA And Skunk Works Secretly Planned To Turn The A-12 Spy Plane Into A Space Launch Mothership An A-12 airplane, one that preceded and likely inspired the SR-71, was studied a long time ago to see if it would be a great way to launch rockets into orbit. The answer in the article is that […]

Turning to Fiber to Move the Competition Along

In the last post (here), I wrote a few guesses about who might want to pay for something like SpaceX’s Starlink or O3b’s broadband constellations. The upshot of that whole exercise was to find out that perhaps the world’s poor probably won’t be the funders of these constellations. Even if these constellations might be cheap. […]

Another False Step for Mankind?

The Orion capsule was successfully tested last week. For those who don’t know, the Orion is NASA’s future crew capable capsule, which will hopefully be used to explore to the moon and beyond. The capsule was tested on December 5, 2014, lofted into space for a very short time and then reentered the Earth’s atmosphere […]

Google Wants a Piece of Virgin

Another space announcement from Google and Virgin Galactic last week took many folks by surprise. Google is supposed to be in talks with Virgin Galactic, and supposedly wants to buy a small stake in the sub-orbital flight company. One telltale sign of the seriousness of the talks is the companies have signed up and registered […]

Imagery Unchained (Finally!)

Back in September 2013 I wrote an opinion about why the US government’s laws regarding imagery resolution were very onerous. The rules just didn’t make sense in a world of cheap picture drones. That opinion was based on a story about DigitalGlobe attempting to get imagery restrictions relaxed so they could compete better in the satellite […]