The View From Here
The View from Here
Glastonbury, Somerset, U.K. – Concurrent with the release of the long-awaited sci-fi blockbuster The X-Files we are on family holiday in Glastonbury, a few hours west of London. Besides being one of the quaintest and most eccentric old towns in the English countryside, Glastonbury has, for more than a millennium, been a destination for pilgrims…
The View From Here
If you obtain news like most Americans, then last week you probably missed one of the most important discoveries in history. A discovery that answered a question humans have been asking since we got up off our knuckles, stood upright, and looked at the stars. The typical American learned last week that Venus Williams recorded…
The View From Here
The grim statistics become more precise daily. The massive (7.9 on the Richter scale) earthquake that hit Sichuan province on May 12 has affected millions of Chinese – more than 60,000 dead, more than 26,000 still missing, 353,290 known injured and as many as five million left homeless. In Myanmar, where Cyclone Nargis struck a…
The View From Here
I was once told in a professional goal-setting session “you are what you measure.” This was my boss’s way of saying we weren’t setting soft, warm, fuzzy performance management goals for me – we were setting hard, no-kidding metrics. In a way, our industry has long suffered from a paucity of no-kidding numbers to report…
The View From Here
As this issue of Space Watch goes to “press,” the global space community is just days away from convening the 24th National Space Symposium. And that means that about two weeks ago the Space Foundation began celebrating its Silver Anniversary. We’re 25 years young, and the view from here is that the current challenging political…
The View From Here
It seems to me that the term “space situational awareness” is rather like the term “pornography.” We all agree it’s a serious problem, but we can’t seem to agree on a definition for it. Yet, by golly, we’re all going to know it when we see it! At the risk of oversimplifying a complex issue,…
Visionary Leaders in a Drive-Thru World
It is January 23, 2008, and Sir Richard Branson is speaking to news media and invited guests gathered in New York for the unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s suborbital passenger liner, SpaceShipTwo. Branson and Scaled Composites’ Burt Rutan have just opened a symbolic set of hangar doors and revealed the tightly kept secret of what the…
The View From Here
Hau’oli Makahiki Hou! That’s Hawaiian for Happy New Year. Having spent my holidays at home in the islands, you’ll forgive me trying to keep aloha alive as we dive into 2008. This year will be as ripe with space-related celebrations and anniversaries as it will be stressed by political, economic, and technical uncertainties. It is…