July 2019
Settling the final frontier
... surprise you, but it shouldn’t. The agency was created to lead civilian space efforts in 1958, during the Cold War and immediately following the USSR’s success with Sputnik. The settlement of space was not on its radar...
October 2019
Time to overcome the expendable rocket mindset
... at the time largely because the budgets for such advanced, prestige projects were diverted in the US by the Cold War race to the Moon and in Europe by Concorde. Moreover, there was no powerful incentive to reduce launch costs for...
June 2020
Building a digital democracy in a planetary pandemic
... Asgardia is the centre point for public investment in a shared goal, without the need for superpower interference, or a Cold War to drive space investments. Let’s not pretend: history tells us that if national pride between Earth countries drives...
June 2021
The next ‘unthinkable’ – global disruption from a solar storm
... blackouts lasting several hours. May 1967 - this storm surprised the military during the climax of the Cold War, when it generated the blackout of polar surveillance radars which led the US military to assume a possible nuclear attack...
August 2021
Collision avoidance – time for agreement on space sustainability
... management of space activity and also to de-escalating tensions The treaty was, however, drafted at the height of the Cold War when space activity was the preserve of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union...
September 2021
Near space - the air-space boundary question, astronauts and space tourism
...), neither of which takes the discussion any further forward. As the OST was written at the height of the Cold War, those drafting it were keen to ensure that conflict in the field of human spaceflight did not spill over...
