DIY Space: Print Your Own Spacecraft

Have you ever wanted to build the Kepler satellite? What about the current crowd favorite, the International Sun Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3)? Or maybe you appreciate textures and just want to touch things, such as the moon’s surface, space shuttle flight panels (with switches), or the surface of Chiron. Maybe you’re a visual type, who truly […]

DIY Space: Print in Spaaaace–In 3-D

Imagine designing the most ingenious piece of 3-D printed goodness, and then having it printed–IN SPACE! If you’re an American child in one of the grades from K through 12, you might be able to make that happen. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Foundation are creating a […]

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 […]

From German Tunnels to Space, Part 7–Living in America

In the last post, I posed the question about whether the US government succeeded in making moral and balanced decisions when a government program, “Operation Paperclip,” was used to shepherd NAZIs into the US. Before you answer that question, here is some more information to consider. Flexible Ethics, Questionable Judgement A very good book, “Operation […]