A few days ago, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence spoke during the opening session of the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Washington, D.C. Pence is the chairman of the White House’s National Space Council. More than six thousand people registered for the event and many of them had to stand in line for security checks to get into the opening ceremony.
Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Part 1 of 3 Parts
Made in Space is a startup based in Mountain View, California. For the past nine years, the company has been working closely with NASA to develop technology that will allow the 3D printing of objects in space and then assemble parts using robots. From its beginnings in 2010,. MIS has had some impressive successes. In 2015, MIS sent a 3D printer to the International Space Station.
The OpenLuna Foundation (OLF) is a San Francisco nonprofit venture that has a plan to create a settlement on the Moon for a cost of around five billion dollars. For the past five years, the OLF has kept a low profile but now they are being more public about their plan.
Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Part 1 of 2 Parts
I have blogged before about all the debris orbiting the Earth left over from space launches. It is estimated that there are more than one hundred million pieces of debris that are less than 1 centimeter in size. They are too small to track with radar but are big enough to cause serious damage to a space craft because they are traveling so fast.
One of the more fantastic ideas for getting into space is the space elevator. The basic idea is that a super strong cable reaches from the Earth’s surface to a huge counterweight that is beyond the twenty-three thousand miles geosynchronous orbit. Vehicles like elevator cars would climb up and down the cable lowering the cost of sending things to and from orbit by several orders of magnitude.
