New York Times (February 13)
“Covid has made us reconsider everything, the meaning of home and work, the value of public space, the magnitude and immediacy of death, what it truly means to be a member of a society. We are still finding the answers to those questions, but the America we knew ended in 2019.”
Tags: 2019, Answers, Covid, Death, Home, Immediacy, Magnitude, Meaning, Public, Questions, Reconsider, Society, Space, U.S., Value, Work
New York Times (February 2)
“Warehouse space is the latest thing being hoarded.” Retailers and logistics companies now confront a new challenge as they “try to stockpile goods to hedge against supply chain problems…. The shortage of commercial warehouse and industrial space is the latest fallout from pandemic-fueled growth in online shopping and shows few signs of abating.”
Tags: Challenge, Commercial, Fallout, Hoarded, Industrial, Logistics, Pandemic, Problems, Retailers, Shortage, Space, Stockpile, Supply chain, Warehouse
New York Times (July 12)
“Mr. Branson’s flight reinforces the hopes of space enthusiasts that routine travel to the final frontier may soon be available to private citizens, not just the professional astronauts of NASA and other space agencies.” Other billionaire entrepreneurs are on his heels, all “risking injury or death to fulfill their childhood aspirations — and advance the goal of making human spaceflight unexceptional.”
Tags: Aspirations, Astronauts, Billionaire, Branson, Childhood, Citizens, Death, Enthusiasts, Entrepreneurs, Final frontier, Flight, Hopes, Human Spaceflight, Injury, NASA, Risk, Routine, Space, Travel
Washington Post (August 21)
“In the past century, since the passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, Americans developed nuclear bombs, traveled to space and invented the Internet. But the country has not come even close to achieving equal representation for women and men in politics.”
Tags: 19th Amendment, Century, Equal representation, Internet, Nuclear bombs, Passage, Politics, Space, U.S., Vote, Women
The Economist (January 20)
“China still lags far behind America in its space accomplishments, but it does not appear bent on a cold-war-style race. It spends far less on its civil space programme than the $19.7bn that NASA was allocated last year.” Still, “China is doggedly pursuing its goals” and is attuned to the progress being made by India, which “is planning its first soft-landing on the moon in March,” just four years after China’s moon landing. With India set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation in the next four years, China is keenly aware that its still smaller neighbor is in hot pursuit.
New York Times (July 16)
“There was something wonderfully childlike in the delight of scientists and the public at the rendezvous of the New Horizons spacecraft with that most distant and mysterious of the planets, Pluto…. But there was nothing childish in the extraordinary science and engineering required to send half a ton of highly sophisticated instruments hurtling through space at speeds of up to 47,000 miles an hour for three billion miles.”
Tags: Childlike, Engineering, New Horizons, Pluto, Science, Sophisticated, Space
Financial Times (December 24)
“The triumph and tragedy of space flight, manned and unmanned, have been on full view over the past year.” Funding both types of space exploration is essential, as each provides benefits. “Space exploration is a worthy activity for our modern industrial civilisation. It is the ‘manifest destiny’ of humanity to move beyond Earth.”
Tags: Benefits, Civilisation, Earth, Exploration, Funding, Humanity, Industrial, Manifest destiny, Manned, Space, Tragedy, Triumph, Unmanned
Washington Post (April 23)
“Budget realities require a modest approach to human space exploration and not an Apollo-style moonshot.” NASA needs to adopt a more practical approach. “Rather than attempting to send people to Mars on the cheap, there’s a compelling argument that we could accomplish more with a less expensive strategy of unmanned exploration.”
Wall Street Journal (December 16, 2013)
“China’s first lunar probe touched down over the weekend and deployed an endearingly named rover, Jade Rabbit. Congratulations are in order for this space success, all the more so because it was a peaceful exploration mission…. Mankind in general should benefit from more such risk-taking.”
Tags: China, Exploration, Jade Rabbit, Lunar probe, Mankind, Mission, Peaceful, Risk-taking, Rover, Space, Success
Forbes (September 12)
About 11 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to go beyond our Solar System. “Now that Voyager 1 is in the space between the stars, it will help improve our knowledge of what conditions are like in interstellar space. And we should get a lot of information about it until about the year 2020, when Voyager’s batteries will start to run out and shut down its systems.”
