As you can see in the left sidebar, I’m planning to attend next month in Orlando. They used to be in San Diego, and I haven’t been to one since before the pandemic. ASCEND was a huge upgrade over their previous annual space conference, and I’m curious to see how much SciTech has changed in the past few years.
As you can see from the program, it has a wide variety of papers on not just space (my primary interest, as always), but aviation as well. The number of simultaneous topics is overwhelming (as it has been in the past), but I’ll be interested primarily in sessions on space resources, space assembly and servicing, life support for larger facilities, nuclear propulsion (both electric and thermal), human logistics in space and space medicine, advances in additive manufacturing, AI applications and, of course space policy. I’ll also be discussing my own participation in the Cislunar Ecosystem Task Force, which was first announced at this event a year ago.
I don’t know if there will be any news broken there, but if there is, I’ll be blogging about it here. I won’t be attending Friday, because I have to be in DC. But I will be there Monday through Thursday, and I hope I’ll see some of you there.
So Rand, by the way, for the love of god *please* take a class, hire a coach… something -anything- to acquire some public speaking skills.
Your book is good, your message important, but people were walking out 20 minutes into your tedious rehash of incidents that everyone already knows about; learn to get to the point man!
nuclear propulsion (both electric and thermal),
If we were serious about Space, (and we are not serious about Space), Project Orion would have been completed decades ago and we’d be only hours to a few weeks from LEO to any planet in our Solar System by now.
Yes it is possible to have nuclear FUSION drive, now, today. We need some MechEng work, but not any scientific breakthroughs.
However we also need a stable world government that doesn’t tie itself into knots over non-proliferation because we have moved beyond tyranny and mutually assured destruction.
Maybe once we have established a nation on Mars, the Martians will build it and leave us to rot.
Happy Holidays everyone….
stable world government
Think of this as the United States writ large. Meaning a federalist system of nations under one umbrella Constitution that defends human rights and self-determination, self-rule, free enterprise, no socialism beyond meeting the most basic needs of the indigent and those incapable of caring for themselves.
I know, I know. Martians will develop fusion drive before we do, they might even outlive us.
We’d better hurry before the EU decides the idea of Mars colonization is illegal…