Amateur Space Commentaries by Jesse

The ISS is amazing: it's the largest object ever built in space, and the most expensive single object on Earth. It's brought us many revolutionary discoveries and inventions. However, human spaceflight has stalled in low Earth orbit, despite having gone to the Moon 50 years ago. It has been the only destination, despite the dreams of many to travel the heavens. But as the space station nears the end of its life, NASA is opening it up to private enterprises, hoping that the civilian market will make good use of it rather than all that effort going to waste. One of the biggest hurdles to private involvement in the ISS has been research law. All discoveries and inventions on the ISS are public property - nothing can be patented, so there's little incentive for tech companies to conduct wildly expensive R&D on the ISS without reaping the profits. While NASA is loosening those restrictions in recent times, it's still a public platform. This is important, because withou...

There's been a lot of excitement lately in the space industry, and specifically in the private sector, about mining in outer space. Although launch prices have been coming down drastically thanks to innovative launch companies like SpaceX, commercial exploitation of space has been held back by high launch costs that have limited space enterprises to highly profitable, unique services such as communications satellites. However, these same dropping launch prices are enabling a wider range of business activities in space, coupled with NASA opening the ISS to business [ link ], and multiple companies seeking to start their own private space stations for business opportunities (i.e. Axiom Space, Bigelow Aerospace). Looming business prospects in low Earth orbit will require basic resources such as oxygen, water, and propellant, as well as raw materials for orbital industries. Additive manufacturing has already been demonstrated in space, and has the potential to create extremely high q...