Tag Archives: rockets

Who’s going the distance in the private sector space race

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spacecraft
Image courtesy NASA/Bill Ingalls.

While Russia struggles to make up ground following a dozen-plus 2011 launch problems and the American Space Launch System sinks in Capitol Hill quicksand, the commercial space sector is racing to fill the gap — and to open new markets in space taxis, trucks and tourism. Since you can’t tell the players without a program, here are the . . .

10 Major Players in the Private Sector Space Race
Quiz: Branson or Bezos: How well do you know the players in the new space race?

Ground control to Major Tom (Thumb)

Tonga
Tonga. Map courtesy CIA.

Who doesn’t love a story about the little guy who makes it big, or the underdog that overcomes? Take these five mighty mites. What they lack in geographical size they make up for in strong economies and supersized space aspirations. As the new space race heats up, and as the airless reaches cease to be the sole province of superpowers, who knows how far their ambitions will carry them?

5 Tiny Countries with Big Space Dreams

Special section: the Middle Kingdom and the outer limits

Chinese astronaut (taikonaut) Nie Haisheng

While Russian launches fail by the dozen, threatening operations aboard the International Space Station, and the American space program stalls amid political wrangling, China is building its own space laboratory, growing its satellite network, expanding its crewed space program, upgrading its launch facilities, improving its lift vehicles and laying the foundations for a moon shot. Are we witnessing the dawn of Chinese dominance in space?

Is China Winning the New Space Race?
10 Signs China is Serious About Space

The M.A.D. world of Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel and several recipients of his namesake Peace Prize alike contributed to warfare and violence in numerous ways—a fact that some find ironic. Yet, Nobel lived at a time when scientists didn’t consider themselves responsible for how others used their inventions, and he held a view of destructive-weaponry-as-deterrent that presaged the Cold War philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction, so perhaps there was a method to his M.A.D.-ness. As for the others I discuss in my article below, only history can judge.

Why is the Nobel Peace Prize kind of ironic?