April 2019
Cleaning up space
More than 60 years after the first Earth orbiting satellite, Sputnik, orbital debris is recognised as a rapidly escalating problem but moves to address the issue remain in relative infancy. Five years ago IT entrepreneur Nobu Okada decided to ...
July 2019
Lessons from our first race to the Moon
Two programmes to place humans on the Moon were underway during the 1960s. The US Apollo programme was spectacularly successful, while the Soviet Union’s effort failed, and information about it was suppressed by the Soviet authorities. Looking at ...
January 2020
Commercialising space exploration and development
When Nanoracks was created a decade ago it became the first company in the world to own and market its own hardware on the International Space Station. In doing so it faced a number of philosophical challenges, in particular because the notion of a ...
April 2020
Reviving Russia’s space programme
‘Troubled’, ‘once-great’, ‘flagging’, ‘accident-prone’, ‘unreliable’ - these are adjectives often found in western accounts of the present-day Russian space programme. Occasional set-backs quickly attract headlines of ‘another Russian failure’, but ...
April 2020
Protecting against the dangers of space radiation
The world is at an ambitious juncture in the history of human space exploration. International space agencies and a number of private companies are aligned to go back to the Moon and then onwards to Mars. But there are still considerable challenges ...
May 2020
Iran - emerging space state or threat to world peace?
Iran recently celebrated 40 years of revolution and 10 years of spaceflight. In 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran commemorated the 40th anniversary of the revolution that transformed the state into a theocracy - with a parliament but with the ...
