Forty-five years ago, Ernst Stuhlinger, the associate director of science at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center, an original member of Wernher von Braun’s Operation Paperclip team, was asked by Sister Mary Jucunda, a Zambia-based nun, how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on spaceflight when many children were starving on Earth.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, the wealthy and polarizing founder of PayPal, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), is on a hot streak when it comes to spaceflight. He’s raiding revenue streams from Nasa and the US military to fund a private manned space program. His main weapon: low prices, with SpaceX offering satellite launches at about one-fifth the price of competitors at just over $60m a pop.
Continue reading… “If we fund Elon Musk instead of NASA, we can send humans back to space”
The crew of Shenzhou 10.
In June, the successful landing of China’s latest manned space mission cast a spotlight on the country’s growing human spaceflight skills as it hones the capabilities needed to build a huge, permanently crewed space station.
Continue reading… “Success of China’s spaceflight sets stage for huge space station”