space
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Why space travel should remain a spectator sport
Space shuttle Discovery at its final launch, looking awesome and polluting like crazyPhoto: NASA Yesterday’s final launch of the space shuttle Discovery provided some amazing images, and probably made a few of us look wistfully at the sky and think of space panoramas (or in my case space poop and space laundry, because I just […]
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We need to start cleaning up space pollution
Image: European Space AgencyIt’s not just the Earth we’re junking up. There’s also a ton of man-made space-crud in orbit around the planet. Efforts to keep track of it are falling short — there are an estimated 600,000 pieces of stuff bigger than a centimeter in diameter, and fewer than 20,000 can be tracked — […]
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Converting astronaut poop to space power — the final frontier?
UNESCO's 2011 space odyssey involves launching a shatellite filled with bacteria that could possibly turn astro-poo into power. At last!
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Space tourism may ignite the effects of global warming
If you "just want to get away" from Earth for a while by indulging your new hobby of space exploration, you may find the planet pretty steamed when you get back.
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Ask Umbra on living off the grid
Q. Hi Umbra, You’ve made several mentions of living off the grid in previous columns, and I was wondering where someone should find such things? It seems as though there are secret communities and communes that everyone seems to know about but me. How would you find an off the grid community, or go about […]
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California utility bets on space-based solar power
A conceptual image of what a space-based solar power plant would look like. The image was commissioned by the National Space SocietyMafic Studios, Inc. Space… the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of PG&E. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new technologies, to seek out new sources of renewable energy and new revenues, to boldly […]
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PG&E signs first-of-a-kind space solar power deal
Not many people I know think space solar is a low-cost, scalable solution. Certainly it is worth pursuing any genuine low-carbon baseload power source if it can be practical and scalable — and affordable, which I would put at $0.15 a kilowatt hour or less for. The problem with space solar is that, like hydrogen […]