Everything You Wanted to Know About BEAM but Were Afraid to Ask

Humanity’s first human-habitable inflatable spaceship, (or as those in the industry prefer to call it, “expandable” spacecraft), is soon to launch off-world. Tucked inside a Dragon cargo transport‘s “trunk” and perched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, this momentous departure targets the International Space Station (ISS) and is slated to occur today. The precious expandable […]

Room with a (global) view

When you gaze outside of your spacecraft, what do you see? What’s it really like to be there? With the advent of digital photography in the hands of determined astronauts willing to make time to steal moments to snap images like the above, now we can know. Have a look. Blow the image up with a click. […]

Following Lockheed Martin’s “Stepping Stones” to Mars

The wake of the cancellation of NASA’s Constellation Program has been devastating to Lockheed Martin’s Orion spacecraft plans. They had been counting on the subsequently-canceled Ares series of rockets to loft Orion to the International Space Station (ISS) as a replacement for the retiring Space Shuttle, with eventual plans as the command module for future […]

Liberating Ares in commercial rocket fray

The NewSpace rocket environment is growing from a band of determined forerunners to a healthy platoon. Salvaging what they could from NASA’s cancelled Ares I rocket, industry giant ATK (responsible for building Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, a critical component in the Ares rocket design,) has teamed up with Eurpoean company Astrium (of Ariane 5 fame) […]

A Radioactive Astronaut-Hopeful (Space update)

By education and trade, I’m a geologist, having worked now in the professional world for more than six years getting my boots dirty performing hydrogeology, water resources, drilling, geomorphology research, and environmental contaminant transport and remediation work in some of the most remote territory this country has to offer. However, in my push toward becoming […]

In Space, Life Imitates Art

When the now-famous image above, possibly the most romantic space exploration image ever taken, hit the net a few days ago, a similarity immediately struck me. One of my favorite modern “romantic realist” artists, Bryan Larsen, painted a nearly identical, visionary image seven years ago, entitled, “How Far We’ve Come“: Not only is the similarity […]