Free Republic

By harnessing the innovation unleashed by the free enterprise system, private space enterprise is ready to explore the next untapped horizon: asteroids. We’re going to the moon. We’re going to Mars. And, before you know it, we’ll be going to the asteroid belt.Space is back, baby. It’s back in the news, back in our thoughts, and back in the culture. America, and the world, are better for it.Over the past few years, space exploration has returned to public consciousness in ways not since the first shuttle mission in 1981, or even since Americans landed men on the moon then brought...

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.

Earth may have a twin orbiting one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a new study suggests. University of California, Santa Cruz graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri star system, our closest stellar neighbors. Guedes' model showed planets forming around the star Alpha Centauri B (its sister star, Proxima Centauri, is actually our nearest neighbor) in what is called the "habitable zone," or the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. The...

US plans for Moon base US space agency Nasa says it is planning to start work on a base on the Moon after astronauts begin flying back there in 2020. The maps and graphics below show how and where man could live on the Moon. Nasa scientists say the best approach is to develop a solar-powered moon base and to locate it near one of the poles of the moon - such as the Shackleton Crater near the South Pole. The poles offer moderate temperatures, high percentage of sunlight which means greater potential for solar power and more opportunities...

Is the surface of a planet the best place for an expanding technological civilization?" O’Neill’s question to his advanced physics students inspired a young generation of thinkers to examine the possibilities of space migration. In the middle 1970s, the accomplishments of Apollo were fresh in our minds and the next steps forward seemed only paused but not yet abandoned. We still dared to have great dreams, and great choices seemed to be opening up. The results of Dr. O’Neill’s initial classroom think tank were described in his Physics Today article in 1975. His 1976 book The High Frontier explored the...

VAN HORN, Texas - Even skeptical locals, who've become wary over the years of city slickers with big ideas for their town, perked up when Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos made his pitch — a spaceport for commercial travel into the beyond. Bezos flew into this West Texas town a few weeks ago to tell key leaders how he planned to use his newly acquired 165,000 acres of desolate ranch land. He also gave his only interview so far on the spaceport to the Van Horn Advocate, the weekly newspaper Larry Simpson runs from the back of his Radio Shack store....

Before there was Greek, Roman, and British colonies, there was a Babylonian colony in Assyria. Founded in 1700 BC according to the Wikipedia, it became a colonizer itself and a conqueror of major colonizer Tyre around 650 BC, well after the Phoenician city that colonized Carthage in 814 BC. The Phoenicians also colonized Motya in Sicily. The Greeks also were great colonizers, setting up their first colony in Al Mina in northern Syria and Ischia on the Bay of Naples, Italy in 800 BC. The Greeks also colonized Syracuse in Sicily from Corinth in 734 BC.