The View From Here

If GE’s strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century. — Jack Welch Most people I know would agree that Jack Welch is no dummy. In an…

 If Hunter S. Thompson were still alive (bless his cannon-scattered ashes), he’d surely describe the atmosphere in our nation’s capitol as Fear and Loathing in Washington, D.C. In all my years of travel there, never – not even after the September 11 attacks – have I seen such dread in the halls of power. The…

 A funny thing happened on the way to the planets: we stopped going. The long-term scientific, economic, technological and humanistic damage caused by the myopic political abortion of the Apollo program is probably too great to ever be accurately assessed. Unlike almost anything else the U.S. government has ever done, space exploration inspired a nation…

Had Scotsman Charles Darwin traveled through time, overshot the Galapagos Islands and splashed upon the shores of the Potomac in 2011, I’m not so sure the theory of evolution would have ever occurred to him. How would Darwin have catalogued the behavior of the elected leadership of a supposedly intelligent species engaged in the existential…

It’s not like we didn’t have anything else to do. While summer conjures up images of lazy days, trips to the beach and warm evenings at the baseball park, for the Space Foundation it is a busy time of year. June always means a couple of weeks in Vienna for our government affairs and international…

Friday, July 8, is scheduled to be the final Space Shuttle launch. It is the end of an era. It is not the end of the world. I’ll be the first to say that I am not happy that the United States is going into a “blackout” period whereby we will not be able to…

On May 18, I had the privilege of testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation as a third-party, unbiased expert on the Contributions of Space to National Imperatives. I was joined by Frank Slazer, vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association, Dr. Christopher F. Chyba, professor of…

If you attended last month’s National Space Symposium, you may have noticed a very strong underlying theme — education. Yes, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education activities have always been a huge part of our Symposium program and, yes, education is a major plank in the Space Foundation’s mission. But, this year, was a…

As I write this note, the Space Foundation team is putting in extra long hours both preparing for the 27th National Space Symposium (which, I must say, is shaping up to be spectacular!) and preparing contingency plans for dealing with a potential U.S. government shutdown – and all that that implies for the Symposium. Both…

Ask anyone on the planet to identify this picture and the chances are good that they’ll know it is a U.S. Space Shuttle. Of the dozens of launch vehicles in use around the world, only the Space Shuttle has achieved this iconic status. (Before anyone sends me any nitpicking, technical e-mail, I’ll acknowledge here that…