Selenian Boondocks

Continuing with my coverage of the Return to the Moon conference, the next panel after Chris’s presentation discussed the important topic of what likely markets there are on the moon. This is pretty darned fundamental to the cause of commercial lunar development, because without actual markets and customers, there will be no commercial lunar development. [...]

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I’m not a huge Mars nut, but this story seems pretty darn cool. Apparently, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has discovered a small lake of ice located in a crater in the Vastitas Borealis region of Mars: Manned exploration and eventually commercial development of Mars may significantly lag the development of the Moon due to the [...]

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The first talk on Friday after Jeff’s brief introduction was by Chris Shank of NASA. Chris works very closely with Mike Griffin there at NASA HQ. In fact, his office is just down the hall a few doors from Mike’s. So, he was here more or less to give us the straight dope on what [...]

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After the Lunar Science Panel, the last discussion was a stand-alone talk by Brett Alexander of t/Space. Brett used to work in the Whitehouse (at the OMB?) during the original work on the Vision for Space Exploration back in 2003. He’s now with t/Space’s Washington DC office. I don’t remember too much about his talk, [...]

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“This isn’t a bubble, it is one of those inflatable buildings supported by a continuously running fan.” -Dave Weinshanker referring to the California real estate market.

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The next panel had two very good NASA speakers, both of who have been with the agency since the Apollo era if I’m remembering right: Larry Taylor and Wendell Mendell. I really liked Larry’s talk, because he focused on how science can be used to enable lunar development. While pure science may be cool, applied [...]

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The next panel after the lunch had an interesting mix of usual suspects and new entrants. For the sake of brevity (something I’m not usually known for), I’m going to just concentrate on the few more interesting parts. One of the interesting talks was by Brant Sponberg, the guy at NASA in charge of their [...]

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Well, after the nice long chat with Randall (that went on till 3am), I ended up sleeping in, and getting to the conference late. I was fortunate that the conference was this week instead of last. As it is, driving through Baker, California it was only 103ish with no AC. Fortunately, Michael had offered me [...]

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Well, the sixth Return to the Moon Conference came and went last week. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice getting to meet some of the people involved in the industry. There were several interesting things that happened at the conference, so over the next few days I’m going to try and [...]

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Sorry for the delay in getting started, but I’ve had a busy week dealing with ISDC 2007 issues and prepping for the Boy Scout Space Exploration merit badge clinic that NSS of North Texas helped with this last weekend. Now that’s all over and done with (except for the homework assignments due on the 30th), [...]

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