Space Review, MarsDrive, and Education

The Space Review has some great articles this week. I especially liked Grant Bonin's article on the case for smaller launch vehicles (first of two parts). There has already been some interesting discussion triggered by this on several blogs, including Space Politics. The article on lasers and directed energy weapons is good too, although this isn't the proudest application of my professional field of optics. Of course the same adaptive optical techniques needed for long-range laser weapons can also be applied to power beaming for space elevators and other applications.

Speaking of Grant, he is also the educational outreach director for MarsDrive Consortium (MDC), and I have signed up to be a member of the team he is building to spread the word about Mars and space exploration in general. MDC is trying to help individuals and groups to pull together in the effort to become a spacefaring civilization. As the FAQ says

The MarsDrive Consortium (“MDC”) is a group engaged in bringing together like- minded individuals, groups and businesses for the purpose of raising the large scale public support and necessary resources for an actual human mission to Mars within the next 2 decades.

I strongly support these goals and will do what I can to help, using Orbiter as one of the tools. To that end, I wrote a short piece on Orbiter for the MDC web site.