Fellow Austinite and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg is quoted by Ker Than, space.com saying that the space station is “an ‘orbital turkey.’ I could almost say no science has come out of it.”

Perhaps our space efforts should be about settlement instead?

You can’t imagine my relief to learn that the earth will “survive” the end of the sun (whatever that means).

Frankly, the thought that the earth wouldn’t “survive” being engulfed in a red giant six billion years from now hasn’t been keeping me staring at the ceiling all night, and to me, absent life, the earth doesn’t have much value. I’m not sure why these folks think we would care whether or not there’s still a big spherical sterile rock pile here.

From the ground.

One of the problems with proposals for space applications is that it turns out that many of them can be done without leaving the planet. But I suspect that the far side of the moon will still always be better for radio astronomy than earth-based telescopes.

Early tomorrow morning. Best viewed on the left coast and west, since it will be too close to dawn in the east.

Early tomorrow morning. Best viewed on the left coast and west, since it will be too close to dawn in the east.

Early tomorrow morning. Best viewed on the left coast and west, since it will be too close to dawn in the east.

No, not the one with David Livingston.

I’m up in northern Michigan, away from the city lights, and it should be good viewing of the Perseids, which peak tomorrow night. There was no moon, to first order, so it should be good viewing this year. I actually saw a couple last night driving, up, one of which was a fireball over the northwestern Detroit suburbs.

If you can get out of town, and the sky is clear tonight, the Lyrid meteors are peaking.

Thomas B. Pickens III gave the luncheon speech at the Space Investment Summit yesterday. He thinks that SpaceX and Rocketplane-Kistler are the “Toyota trucks” of the space infrastructure and that Space Hab will make a good business of packing science payloads to send to the Space Station. He is interested in ISS racks but can do free floating experiments and also work with Bigelow. I asked him afterwards if doing his “due diligence” as a board member before taking over as CEO he talked to the customers. He said that every customer said that they were interested if it were cheaper, more reliable and standardized.

I think that this market may not be as big as Bigelow and Space Hab are hoping. It remains to see if a business can be made. The Bull I prefer is Space Tourism. Space Hab did say they could do logistics missions too. Glad to have you as part of the industry, Thomas B. Pickens. Best of luck.