The View From Here

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!, Space Cadets: the sky is not falling. I’m not really sure when optimism became passé, if, indeed, it has. Surrounded, as we are, with an elephantine labyrinth of media “channels” — oh, the marketing speak! — and each one nattering, nefarious, with the salacious doom and gloom that sells advertising (If…

On Feb. 24,the Space Foundation will partner with K2 Communications, Giant Screen Films and the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to hold a private advance screening of Journey to Space, a new, very large format film that celebrates the achievements of the Apollo, Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs. Importantly, Journey…

2014 was a very good year for space. Not great. Not perfect. Not without a stumble here and there. But, overall, a very good year — one that we can build upon. I know this because at the end of each calendar year, right before the holiday break, the Space Foundation works through the process of short-listing…

With snow building in the Rockies, I’m tuning up my skis and looking forward to a few impromptu downhill races. I’ve never won one of those by throttling back, schussing conservatively within my limits, or being afraid to leave the Earth and catch a little air. Risk taking has been frequently on my mind lately…

Some important, horrifying, costly lessons have been learned in the past several months, about the dangerous world we live in. These lessons teach us that no country, especially the United States, can place its affairs on autopilot and blithely hope to wish away events that do, in fact, affect every person on the planet.  …

“The original Star Trek imagined the futuristic fulfillment of John F. Kennedy’s inspirational oratory, in which his New Frontier became “the final frontier.” The budget surpluses and budding space program of the early 1960s gave rise, in the 23rd century, to the utopian United Federation of Planets. On the Starship Enterprise, men and women, blacks…

In November of 2008, I penned an article about space exploration in the context of Polynesian Wayfinding, called “Charting A Course and Setting Sail.” What prompted that article was my having had the rare privilege of sailing aboard the historic Hawaiian double-hulled sailing canoe, Hokulea. Today, Hokulea is embarked upon another epic sailing voyage -…

If all you know about the Space Foundation is what you see during the annual Space Symposium, you’ve certainly seen us at our best — but you’ve also only seen the tip of the iceberg.  Looking back at just the past three weeks, I’m in awe of our team — which continues to “punch above…

One of the more disturbing bits of data in The Space Report 2014 concerns the continued slashing of federal space budgets by the United States. For the first time since the Space Foundation began tracking this data, global government spending on space declined in 2013 – and with most other countries either maintaining or increasing…

Elliot Pulham’s The View From Here will return for the July issue of Space Watch. This article is part of Space Watch: June 2014 (Volume: 13, Issue: 6).