Author Archives: billgamesh

Having landed on the Moon a half century ago we should have fleets of spaceships traveling the solar system by now. You would think. The reality is the public does not understand what would define a true spaceship. Though I have always disliked similes concerning space, especially those like JFK’s calling space an ocean, itContinue reading “The Spaceship”

“BTW, all, just for context, it appears that 2019 OK is by far the largest asteroid [to] pass this close to Earth in the last century!” reads one subsequent email from Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson. NASA experts determined that a combination of factors ultimately caused the agency to miss it, including the position ofContinue reading “Sooner or Later”

I made some references to being a Queen fan in a previous post and mentioned the song “39.” On my birthday a few days ago I averaged the lifespans of my Mother and Father and figured out what year I would die if that average held true- and it was, coincidentally, 2039. Less than 20Continue reading “Leaving in 2039”

My (now slightly edited) comment on https://phys.org/news/2019-09-europe-teaming-asteroid-deflection.html “Nothing will work better than a nuclear device. Yet there are several entities who are pushing their “gravity tug” or other concepts and they have hijacked this train.” However, the train has not left the station yet. A human crewed Nuclear Pulse Propelled spaceship capable of interplanetary missionsContinue reading “Planetary Defense Space Force”

For a few million more dollars von Braun would have made Skylab a true wet workshop instead of a dry one. It would have gone up in one launch and been larger inside than the multi-billion dollar ISS which took years to assemble. This does not even take into account the fact that we neverContinue reading “The International Space Station is Worthless”

Looked at the news this morning and the Amazon is burning, Greenland is melting, and this evening David Koch is dead. Yesterday spacexnews had an article about nuclear power in space. The comments were truly idiotic. Surprised my name was not brought up since I endlessly commented about nuclear energy and space propulsion. They areContinue reading “A Night at the Opera”

Looks like the second quarter of 2021 for the first flight of the Space Launch System, just under two years from now. Plenty of time for NASA to rationalize their Human Space Flight program by abandoning LEO and redirecting that over 4 billion a year into expanding SLS launch cadence. In my view the criticalContinue reading “SLS 2021”

Concerning a recent article I read about the Fermi Paradox: https://phys.org/news/2019-08-world-history-silent-cosmos-humans.html The simple explanation could very well be correct: life is too stupid to survive. We may reach a certain level of technology and then invariably self-destruct. My view on this is our own mortality virtually guarantees extinction in a self-similar way. Who cares (veryContinue reading “Visionaries?”

And all that methane in the permafrost is also being released. If we were to start building Super Heavy Lift Vehicles next year and launching them every other month to start, and ultimately once a week, that would be how to address climate change. Actually, the only way to address climate change with any chanceContinue reading “Greenland is Melting”

Certainly not a shiny starship! I could predict a rock causing loss of life and a second space age launched to detect, intercept, and deflect asteroid and comet impact threats. Or weather events that cannot be interpreted as anything other than climate change and space solar power as the only solution. Perhaps it will beContinue reading “What is the Future?”