Tag: Space
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The great glass elevator
As usual, the space scientists leave me open-mouthed with wonder. Latest preposterous challenge: getting stuff into space is expensive – rockets and space-suits and beef stroganoff in a tube and…
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“It looks like we have a no-chute, sir”
This is how you test the resilience and optimism (and sanity) of a human being. You ask him to work for 14 years on a space science project, you grant…
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Enlightened old men
I wonder if there’s a generation of scientists, artists and technocrats ready to succeed Freeman Dyson, Arthur C Clarke and all those other admirable, enlightened, imaginative old men who came…
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A death examined
I think this may be the most heartbreaking reporting to come out of the Columbia disaster: “The communication checks continue. So does the silence. A radar station near the Kennedy…
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Are you a Baconian or a Cartesian?
Freeman Dyson quotes Bacon in his NYRB review of a book about the importance of amateur astronomers: All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature,…