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Until this past week, it was looking as if the United States was repeating the fate of other declining great powers, in at least one notable respect, China’s Ming Dynasty. Some 600 years ago, the Ming emperors sent forth into the unknown a series of massive fleets to travel the seas and acquire
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Date:
8/6/2012
Imagine you were planning to hike the entire Appalachian Trail -- all 2,181 miles from Georgia to Maine -- without stopping to replenish supplies. What would you set out with in your backpack? The answer is obvious. Almost everything you carried would be food or water, because that's what you
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Date:
11/7/2011
As the final mission of the Space Shuttle approaches, a feeling of sadness and regret hangs over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Despite protestations by senior political appointees that the space agency has an exciting future, most of us sense it isn't so. NASA's signature
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Date:
7/6/2011
My critical commentary on commercial launch provider SpaceX appearing at Forbes.com last week attracted 11,000 readers and a handful of outraged responses from company supporters. I have followed up with a second commentary this week focusing on how SpaceX's track record compares with that of more
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Date:
5/31/2011
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is betting billions of dollars on the success of so-called commercial launch providers such as SpaceX. And money isn't the only thing it's betting: with the Space Shuttle retiring and its planned successor canceled, there won't be much left to NASA's
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Date:
5/23/2011
The White House has decided not to comment on a looney complaint brought by the National Labor Relations Board that argues Boeing shouldn't be allowed to open an aircraft plant in South Carolina because building such a facility in a right-to-work state could undercut the bargaining position of labor
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Date:
5/13/2011
This week's Bloomberg Businessweek contains the latest adulatory media profile of Elon Musk, the California entrepreneur who is said to be shaking up the space-launch industry. As usual, the profile is long on Musk's opinions and short on any details about how his space business is actually
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Date:
5/5/2011
The greatest adventure in human history is ending in its infancy. NASA's human spaceflight program, a signature achievement of American civilization, is dying. The program was conceived during the bleak days following Russia's launch of Sputnik in 1957, and then was energized by President John
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Date:
4/25/2011
I was feeling pretty good about authoring the lead opinion piece in Space News this week concerning why a manned landing on Mars must become the goal of NASA's human spaceflight program. The title of the essay was "Mars is the Only Destination That Matters," because in my view a mission
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Date:
10/22/2010
It's a longstanding complaint of scientists and engineers that national political elites schooled in the humanities don't grasp the consequences of the technology choices they make. C. P. Snow wrote an essay lamenting the gulf between the "two cultures" -- science and the humanities -- in 1956,
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Date:
9/21/2010
If you want to find a good case study of what's gone wrong with the federal government's support for new technology over the past generation, you probably can't do better than NASA's human spaceflight program. Sending astronauts into space was one of those signature missions that made America different
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Date:
9/17/2010
The Obama Administration plan to reorganize America's manned space-flight program is making rapid progress on at least one front: dismantling what was inherited from previous administrations. The last mission of the Space Shuttle is now only five months away, after which the United States will
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Date:
6/10/2010
You don't have to be a political scientist or an engineer to see what the Obama Administration plan for NASA's manned space flight program means. It is the end of the road. The brave vision of human beings walking on the Moon and Mars that was born in the Kennedy years is dying, overwhelmed by
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Date:
2/12/2010