This is my first trip to this venerable conference, which for decades was held in Logan, UT, where the university there, Utah State, was a hotbed of this developing technology as a result of innovative faculty. This year it’s at the convention center in Salt Lake City, and it’s huge, as would befit this burgeoning industry. There’s a cavernous exhibit hall with hundreds of exhibitors.
My concern is that the industry may be in a bubble. I’m seeing several vendors for some of the technologies, and it’s not clear to me that they’ll all survive, or how they’ll compete. But that’s the dynamic nature of new tech.
This is a good change, particularly if it lights fires under other contenders than Vast. But NASA should never have been in the business of “certifying” commercial space facilities. The industry does need to develop some building codes, though.
Yes, putting a nuclear reactor (in fact, several of them) on the Moon is a great idea, but it’s out of context with the policy mess. If we want to put reactors on the Moon, we have to come up with a scalable, affordable transportation infrastructure to get not only them, but lots of things there. We don’t currently have one, and no one in the administration seems to be concerned about it.
I suspect that the end will come when my generation is gone, if not sooner. Younger people don’t have the fidelity to it that the Boomers do. When I’m traveling, I realize how spoiled I am by DVR. “You mean I have to actually be in my room at 7 PM to watch Gutfeld?”
Well, it’s next weekend, and we’re back from Vegas. Here‘s a good article on the state of play for the beast. I suspect that the hed wasn’t written by the author.