NASA’s Black Hole Budgets
By S. Alan Stern, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist. He was an associate administrator in charge of the NASA Science Mission Directorate from 2007 to 2008 (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 24/11/08):
A cancer is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects. Unmistakable new indications of this illness surfaced last month with NASA’s decision to spend at least $100 million more on its poorly-managed, now-over-$2 billion Mars Science Laboratory. This decision to go forward with the project, a robotic rover, was made even though it has tripled in cost since its inception, it is behind schedule,…
Fly Me to the Deity
By Tunku Varadarajan, a professor of business at New York University, and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 29/10/08):
An unmanned spacecraft from India — that most worldly and yet otherworldly of nations — is on its way to the moon. For the first time since man and his rockets began trespassing on outer space, a vessel has gone up from a country whose people actually regard the moon as a god.
The Chandrayaan (or “moon craft”) is the closest India has got to the moon since the epic Hindu sage, Narada, tried to reach it on…
It’s Time to Retire the Shuttle
By John M. Logsdon. The writer, who was featured in the “Nova” documentary “Space Shuttle Disaster,” holds the Lindbergh chair in aerospace history at the National Air and Space Museum and was formerly director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the Smithsonian Institution. (THE WASHINGTON POST, 16/10/08):
Among the many tough decisions facing the next president is the future of our civilian space program. There are conflicts over how long to fly the space shuttle, which are linked to questions about continued American access to the international space…
Harvest the Sun — From Space
By O. Glenn Smith, a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 22/07/08):
As we face $4.50 a gallon gas, we also know that alternative energy sources — coal, oil shale, ethanol, wind and ground-based solar — are either of limited potential, very expensive, require huge energy storage systems or harm the environment. There is, however, one potential future energy source that is environmentally friendly, has essentially unlimited potential and can be cost competitive with any renewable source: space solar power.
Science fiction? Actually, no — the technology…
Britain should be leading the search for life on Mars
By Colin Pillinger, the principle investigator for the Beagle 2 Mars project, part of the European Space Agency’s 2003 Mars Express mission (THE GUARDIAN, 28/05/08):
The triumphant landing of the Phoenix craft on Mars is a tribute to the team of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California - one of whom, Peter Smith, was a colleague of mine on the Beagle 2 mission to the planet in 2003. Using the Mars reconnaissance orbiter, they selected an excellent place to land, and were able to use thrusters to hit the spot safely and softly.
But it’s also a tribute to the…
Let’s forget Nasa’s fancy ideas
By Martin Rees. Lord Rees of Ludlow is Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society (THE TIMES, 14/02/08):
It is more than 35 years since Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan, the last men on the Moon, returned to Earth. The Apollo programme now seems a remote historical episode: children all over the world learn that America landed men on the Moon, just as they learn that the Egyptians built the Pyramids; but the motivations seem almost as bizarre in the one case as in the other.
The recent film In the Shadow of the Moon depicted these historic - indeed heroic…
What Sputnik Launched
By Charles Krauthammer (THE WASHINGTON POST, 05/10/07):
Fifty years ago this week, America was shaken out of technological complacency by a beeping 180-pound aluminum ball orbiting overhead. Sputnik was a shock because we had always assumed that Russia was nothing but a big, lumbering and all-brawn bear. He could wear down the Nazis and produce mountains of steel but had none of our savvy or sophistication. Then one day we wake up and he has beaten us into space, placing overhead the first satellite to orbit the Earth since God placed the moon where it could give us lovely sailing tides.
At the time,…
How Russia lost the moon
By Sergei Khrushchev, senior fellow at The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University © (THE GUARDIAN, 02/10/07):
Fifty years ago, on October 4 1957, my father, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, was waiting for a call from Kazakhstan: the designer, Sergei Korolev, was due to report on the launch of the world’s first satellite. My father was in Ukraine, on military business, and that evening he dined with Ukrainian leaders. I sat at the end of the table, not paying attention to their conversation. Around midnight my father was asked to take a phone call. When he came back,…
The Planet NASA Needs to Explore
By Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, Mark Abbott, dean of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and Jim Luyten, acting director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass (THE WASHINGTON POST, 10/05/07):
Decades ago, a shift in NASA priorities sidelined progress in human space exploration. As momentum gathers to reinvigorate human space missions to the moon and Mars, we risk hurting ourselves, and Earth, in the long run. Our planet — not the moon or Mars — is under significant threat…
NASA Goes Deep
By Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist, the leader of the Imaging Science Team on the Cassini mission and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 20/02/07):
AFTER years of spending our nation’s space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon … and beyond. We are finally, bodily, going to make our way into space, this time to stay.
It is an opinion long…
To ignore the moon would be lunacy
By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 08/12/06):
The Moon was always the reflection of our dreams. Only in the most recent fraction of human history have we known that it is a place, a rock, a thing, rather than an idea, a phenomenon or a god.
The moon was a veiled ghost, the deity of time and madness. It pulled the tides, measured out our months and perhaps too the ovulation of woman, the origin of human life itself.
We gave the Moon names, in every culture, and for every season: Harvest Moon, Blue Moon, Strawberry Moon. The Sun has no equivalent adjectival richness. For…
A Marte sin billete de vuelta
A Marte sin billete de vuelta. Paul Davies es profesor de Historia Natural del Centro Australiano de Astrobiología (EL MUNDO, 17/01/04).
Cien años de Astronáutica
Cien años de Astronáutica. Martín J. Gamero Castro-Mansilla, ingeniero aeronáutico (EL MUNDO, 06/01/04).
