Archive

In spite of the current difficult times (wars, protests, pandemic…), and from an information and technology accessibility point of view, we live in a wonderful time. On the one hand, regarding knowledge, anyone with a decent internet connection and sufficient time can learn everything on the internet for free. On the other hand, the maturity of technologies and means of production allows today to put in the hands of ordinary people real jewels that allow them to develop/experiment in their garage projects worthy of big laboratories and companies....

Have you ever wondered how the engineers and technicians of today’s most innovative space companies work? what are their technological choices? their software and hardware stack? and other more technical questions? well, you’ll be served. A team of SpaceX engineers have played the game of a Reddit AmA (Ask me Anything) and gave many valuable details on the SpaceX rocket. The session is quite long (around 2.300 comments/questions), this is why I will make this editorial as short as possible ;-)...

I just finished Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. An extraordinarily well-written popular science book that I highly recommend. The author takes us on a journey through all ages and through all kind of sciences, and romances the greatest scientific discoveries and principles in a light, exciting, and epic way. In this issue, I would like to share with you some space-related passages and information that caught my attention:...

Hi friends 🖖; Hope you’re all right and that the confinment situation is under control. In this editorial, I chosed to put together some not-so-common amazing facts about space and satellites. Please enjoy, and as always, all sorts of feedbacks and comments are very welcome: Here’s a small read and an artist’s impression about the exoplanet J1407b and its amazing MASSIVE ring system. How loud would the sun be if it wasn’t in the vacuum of space?...

Hi friends 🖖; Everyone, especially Age of Empires enthusiasts 😉, has already heard about the archaeological periods that have marked our civilization. Thus the Stone Age characterizes the prehistoric period when men made various stone tools, the Bronze and Iron Age marks the mastery of metallurgy, the colonial period refers to the establishment of contact with the New World etc. However, there exist also similar classification, but on a more macroscopic scale....

“UAE” is often seen in the headlines of this newsletter even if it is one of a handful of countries to join the space race only recently. I find the story of this adventure exciting and I will try in this not-so-short editorial to give you a little recap of the history of the UAE mainly from camel riding to a Mars rover project. And this advanture took less than 50 years… That is to say that a bedouin who experienced misery at the age of 5, today, he has barely started his retirement....

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure described in 1960 by the American-British physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson (cf issue 6). It is an empty spherical structure built around a star to capture its radiated energy in all directions. Nothing escapes. I will not go into details but it is clear, from numerous perspective, that this is unfeasible. But why don’t we simplify the problem? Instead of a continuous sphere around the sun, imagine a constellation of satellites around the earth....

You remember this post of the newsletter on why adapting space to humans where we can adapt humans to space. I have since been searching quite actively on the internet for resources that have explored this option. I came across a great paper from 1960 entitled “Cyborgs and space” co-authored by Manfred E. Clynes, research director in electronic data-processing systems, and Nathan S. Kline, research director in psychiatry. In the abstract, it reads:...

Hi friends; Because of COVID-19, several countries have decided to close their borders to limit the spread of the pandemic. As a result, air traffic is severely impacted and several lines are simply suspended. The daytime sky is almost free of airplane trails and the night sky is almost free of bright and fast moving dots (except for a few Starlink satellites but that’s another story). It is time to raise your head up and admire the sky as our ancestors once saw it....

The two main challenges in colonizing other planets are transportation and survival once there. For the first point, in addition to the economic costs and technological challenges, the very long duration of the journey makes the crossing psychologically and biologically stressful. Remember that The Voyager 1 probe has covered only 0.0005% of the distance to the nearest star, yet it has been traveling nonstop for 42 years at an insane 60....

In the previous issue, we explored a little bit the considerations we need to take into account with these mega-constellation programs. As announced last time, I will try to complete this list here: If the price and performance of the networks offered by these constellations are as planned, it’s very likely that this will become the standard for connecting to the internet. We will therefore be witnessing a paradigm shift: whereas today satellites are seen more as a backup solution for terrestrial networks (earthquake, tsunami, pandemic, etc....

Last week during a coffee break, I discussed with a friend on white zones in France and the role that satellites can play in reducing them. Everybody pretty much agrees on the positive role that satellites can play in connecting the world. Here, I would like to set out my vision of the dark side of the recent initiatives toward this goal. There are today several mega-constellation projects with the promise of offering a very high speed internet connection, at affordable prices and anywhere on the globe....

Last week I shared with you a historical paper by the English writer Clarke in which he described the GEO orbit. France has also experienced a similar prodigy. Like Clarke, his novels are always well documented, generally set in the not-so-far future, and imagine the technologies of the time. He is one of the most famous authors in history, and he is the second most translated author in a foreign language after Agatha Christie…You have probably found him, he is Jules Verne....

Today I want to share with you a little discovery. Arthur Charles Clarke, born in 1917 in the United Kingdom and died on 19 March 2008 (at the age of 90) in Sri Lanka, was a British science fiction writer, science writer, futurologist, TV presenter, underwater explorer and inventor. In 1945, just after the end of the WWII and 12 years before the first satellite in history was put into orbit, Sputnik 1, Clarke published an article in the Wireless Wold Magazine, a british electronics journal, in which he proposed a completely surrealistic project:...

On a remote island on the Indian coast called North Sentinel, lives a native tribe of about 200 people. According to the estimate of some scientists, the Sentineles have been living on this 72 km2 piece of land for thousands of years, and their way of life has hardly changed since then. There has been very little contact with us (as in this short video where men offer them coconuts) as they refuse all approaches and kill anyone who ventures on their land....

You may have noticed in the media that spacemen are called different names depending on their nationality. Thus the term astronauts are reserved for the American space travellers, cosmonauts for the Russians, spationauts for the French/Europeans, taikonauts for the Chineese and vyomanauts for the Indians. Even if only the first two are officially recognized, it is customary today that space powers show a particularly strong patriotism when it comes to naming their spacemen....

Following the last launch of Starlink satellites, I came again across the video of Elon Musk in which he shares his vision and plan to make humans an interplanetary species. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole about the feasibility or not of this surrealistic project…Let us assume here that this will happen in the near future. Close enough to be able to transpose the vision of our world as we know it today....