11 August 2025
Saying goodbye to my favourite astronaut
... astronauts and commander of the ill-fated but heroic Apollo 13 mission, has died aged 97. A veteran of four spaceflights – Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 – Lovell’s career stands as a testament to skill, resilience, and the human drive...
September 2016
Moon or Mars - how logical is NASA’s next step?
... Industries’ lobbyists essentially wrote the Space Competitiveness Act for the congressmen who supplied it. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation which was set up by some of the most eminent names in the commercial space industry (ie, SpaceX, Blue...
September 2017
Europe needs facility to handle extra-terrestrial space material
The typical constraints of spaceflight mean that the mass, the volume, the power supply and the data feed of pieces of equipment ...
November 2017
Reusable air-launch and the space access paradigm
Today, after more than half a century of spaceflight, our activities in space are still limited to a relatively small number of technical disciplines and missions, while human ...
November 2017
Delivering a revolutionary reduction in space launch costs
We are in the midst of a transformational era in the history of spaceflight. What was once an activity purely limited to governments and national space agencies is now experiencing a flourish of innovation ...
November 2018
Creating the ‘Space for Art Foundation’
In 2016, shortly after retiring from NASA, I started writing this Space for Art column as a way to share spaceflight and space-themed projects and the wonderful intersection between science and art. The title of the ...
