April 2024
Planning, designing and delivering a spaceport
... the 1990s. It is generally acknowledged to be the battleground of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), startups and disruptors, which challenge the way of the old guard with a faster, leaner and profit-minded approach to space-related activity...
May 2017
Will international space law struggle to remain relevant?
... regime for spaceflight in circumstances where belligerents were using space assets to engage in direct conflict - many other challenges arise before such a system could be designed and implemented. The risks need to be assessed and understood; not...
March 2018
Mapping the dark universe
... research networks will be used to transfer the large volume of science data. The proposed setup introduces a number of challenges that have to be addressed. In particular the fact that the availability and ‘end-to-end’ performance (in terms of delay...
January 2019
Saving humanity – is space up to the job?
... impacts. In this article Dr Joseph Pelton, a passionate advocate of using space systems to help humanity, provides an overview of the challenging issues we face and offers some innovative solutions that we might do well to heed. Since the Space Age...
February 2019
The Space Elevator – an alternative path to space?
... also dictates a smallest tether size that can be climbed on. Computer graphic of a Space Elevator tether terminus platform. Challenges and risks Space debris is a high risk for a static elevator, as anything that doesn’t follow an exactly periodic...
January 2021
Safeguarding space - lessons from decommissioning in the energy industry
... of decommis- sioning in the energy sector Each of the aforementioned terrestrial industries has also had to confront the challenges posed in respect of their ‘legacy waste’, that is the pre-existing installations or materials that are not covered...
