Space

Plus: seeing space in a certain kind of light, and 2018 ballot referendums.

Plus: seeing space in a certain kind of light, and 2018 ballot referendums.

John Podhoretz: The new Neil Armstrong biopic starring Ryan Gosling is a joyless schlep.

Actually, yes.

It's a foot in the final frontier that America should keep.

It has different math, geography, and history. And Hillary is president.

If you had hopes of launching a nuclear weapon into orbit, we have bad news.

Much as the name Tiger Woods is familiar to people who do not follow golf, so the name Stephen Hawking will be familiar even to people who care little about physics. His death on March 14 provoked an outpouring of eulogies of the kind usually reserved for rock stars and former presidents. His…

The successful launch on Tuesday of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket—“the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two,” as the company is proud of saying—marked an important milestone for the entrepreneurial space company and for the overall U.S. launch industry.

It certainly stands to reason that the news most likely to unite a nation divided against itself would win so little notice in a year like 2017. Maybe we just don’t want to overcome our differences in fearsome awe of the intergalactic Other, OK? The popular appetite for otherworldly updates is…

Because this year’s schedule meant football on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, TMQ didn’t watch any. But how can you miss me when I won’t go away? My holiday gift to readers is a column-length expansion of Tuesday Morning Quarterback’s A Cosmic Thought item.

There are regular old games, then there are Authentic Games. Tuesday Morning Quarterback judges teams by the latter.

Can you hear me now? Apparently, one of president Trump's top economic advisors faked a bad connection while in a meeting with Democratic senators on tax reform to get the President to stop talking. Yikes.

The operations of the U.S. military depend on space assets. Reconnaissance satellites allow us to find our adversaries; communications satellites allow us to coordinate movements against them; global positioning satellites allow us to direct our weaponry with unprecedented accuracy. In any…

Space comes to Wisconsin. I'm a huge fan of the website Atlas Obscura. Every neat place I've wanted to visit (especially abandoned things) is on there, and many places I've visited have been because of their site. Part of my bucket list is derived from there, too. Their newsletter is a welcome…

Can we send the Boy Scouts an economics textbook? I love popcorn. It's my favorite snack. I was also a Cub Scout once, and selling Trail's End popcorn was my least-favorite fundraising activity. (Selling magazine subscriptions for my Catholic grade school was much easier.) My mom, saint that she…

Ah, September. The air is turning crisp. Soon leaves will show colors; the holidays are in prospect; everyone looks better in sweaters. Yours truly loves autumn and its September-to-Christmas parade. Each year we live through two days that are not September-to-Christmas to earn the privilege of…

One of the lesser-noted lines from Donald Trump’s inaugural address was “We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space.” During his speech to a joint session of Congress a month later, the president said, “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a…

Who is the history's greatest explorer? Marco Polo, Magellan, da Gamma and Cook are the main contenders, along—of course—with Christopher Columbus, whose star has fallen over the last few decades. Vancouver, Peary, Amundsen and Scott all have their partisans, as do Lewis and Clark. There are Cortez…

So far, as president, Donald Trump has said all the right things about space. He wants NASA focused on exploration again. He wants men flying back to the moon in 2018. In his pseudo-State of the Union last week, he reminded the country that "American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a…

In the months following John F. Kennedy's 1961 pledge to put men on the moon, NASA conceived a plan wherein an Apollo capsule and its three crewmen would descend to the lunar surface atop a giant, multi-stage rocket; when it was time to go home, the rocket would be powerful enough to blast the…

For a lot of obvious reasons, the U.S. is filled with space enthusiasts. Most space enthusiasts, you'll find, have a favorite mission. For many, it's Mercury-Atlas 6, John Glenn's orbital flight. For many it's Gemini 4, when Ed Young made the first American Spacewalk, or Gemini 6, the first ever…

After more than 20 years of planning, development, near cancellation, blood, sweat and tears, the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope is complete; it was was just completed. It took seven years longer than it was supposed to and went seven billion, two hundred million dollars over…

Responding to mild U.S. sanctions on Russia, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced on May 13 that U.S. astronauts would no longer be welcome to ride to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Russian rockets.  “After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest the…

Josh Gelernter on how to sanction the Russians:

Highlighting “the dismantling of the space program over the last four years,” Paul Ryan said in Orlando on Saturday, “Today, if we want to send [our] astronaut[s] to the space station, we have to pay the Russians to take them there.  [The crowd booed at the thought.]  China may someday be looking…

The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), an official mouthpiece of the Iranian regime, reports that "Iran will send monkey into space in early 2012."

Mitt Romney is back to talking about firing people.  During last night’s debate, he responded to Newt Gingrich’s proposal that America establish a lunar colony by the end of the decade by saying that if someone presented him with that proposal, “I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’”  While one might think…

During last night’s debate, Mitt Romney responded to Newt Gingrich’s proposal that America establish a lunar colony by the end of the decade by saying that if someone presented him with that proposal, “I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’” While one might think Romney justified in firing someone who pitched…

Forty-two years ago yesterday, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ascended from the surface of the moon and rendezvoused with Michael Collins in the command module Columbia for their trip home from mankind’s maiden voyage to the moon. All three men are now in their 80s, and no human being…

The Economist magazine thinks the Space Age is probably over, and the discussion of our space future (or non-future) in its new issue is intelligent and informative. I've found over the years, though, that in many instances, the Economist's suave articulation of the not-so-cutting edge of…

Writing in USA Today, Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, and Jim Lovell —the first and last men on the moon, and the commanders of Apollo 11, 17, and 13 — highlight another example of President Obama’s lack of faith in American exceptionalism.  In a piece entitled, “Is Obama Grounding JFK’s Space…

If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later . . . bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; . . . that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; . . . that humankind would…