Worthwhile Reading
Haven’t posted one of these for while, so here are a few links I found interesting… Tom Wolfe on the space race as a combat of individual champions in the ancient style. Zoning rules as an enemy of...
View ArticleMore Heinlein Stories
I recently posted a brief review of The Man Who Sold the Moon, a 1950 story about the first lunar trip, and thought some reviews of other early Heinlein stories might be of interest as well. (For...
View ArticleSputnik Anniversary Rerun–Book Review: Rockets and People
Today being the 62nd anniversary of the Sputnik launch, here’s a rerun of a post about a very interesting book. Rockets and People, by Boris E Chertok Boris Chertok’s career in the Soviet aerospace...
View ArticleThe Cuban Missile Crisis, as Viewed From a Soviet Launch Facility
This month marks the 57th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world dangerously close to thermonuclear war. Several years ago, I read Rockets and People, the totally...
View ArticleAnother Possible Explanation for the Absence of Space Aliens
The physicist Enrico Fermi wondered why we haven’t seen any evidence of visitors from another planet, given that he believed intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy was highly probable. (Maybe we...
View ArticleThoughts from a Cosmonaut
Valentina Leonidovna Ponomaryova is a former Soviet cosmonaut: with a background in applied mathematics, she was selected in 1962 as a member of the first group of women cosmonauts. Never got to fly a...
View ArticleNot Humanity’s Last View …
This is being described as “humanity’s last view of the JWST.” I expect imaging, and even direct viewing, of the James Webb Space Telescope from terrestrial telescopes to become a popular amateur...
View ArticleAn Interesting Startup
Here’s a company, Hadrian, which is planning to build a series of factories for manufacturing of precision metal components. Their first factory is in Hawthorne, CA, and they’re building the next one...
View ArticleStarvation and Centralization
It’s now well-known that the nation of Sri Lanka has been reduced to poverty, hunger, and chaos by top-down policies requiring organic farming and forbidding the use of artificial fertilizers. Western...
View ArticleApollo Missions and an Alternative History
Fifty-four years ago today, Apollo 11 lifted off for its historic mission to the moon. For those 2 of you who have followed my occasional blogs on the Neptunus Lex page – you know how I like history –...
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