I was thrilled to hear about NASA’s discovery of water on Mars. I am hoping it will contribute to interest in a human mission to Mars. Ideally, such a mission would not be under the banner of a single nation but rather include team members from around the world. Why travel to space at all when there are so many problems to solve here? Many of the problems here have old historical gripes attached to them that will take a long time to overcome. Mars offers a unique opportunity to co-operate glo...

Yesterday we landed a probe on a comet. I am saying we because this is a major accomplishment for humanity. For reference, powered heavier-than-air flight was invented only a tad more than one hundred years ago. It is important to really let this sink in. After millennia of dreaming about flying into the skies we went in a little over a century all the way to steering a craft to line up with a comet traveling at 40,000 miles an hour! What makes all of this possible is human ingenuity together...

And now for something completely different. Like most (all?) geeks, I love the idea of human space travel. I know we have got tons of problems to fix here, but I don’t think that should deter us from pursuing some of our other dreams (after all we wouldn’t have airplanes either had folks waited for everything else to be dandy). So I was dismayed to read that NASA’s mandate continues to be to pursue a heavy lift strategy. It is the space travel equivalent of scaling up instead of scaling out. ...