NASA Keeps Its Telescope's Dubious James Webb Name, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from WIRED space writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
This will be my last post of the year. Happy holidays, happy winter solstice, and see you all in 2023!
NASA Will Not Change the James Webb Telescope’s Name
Even after a close look at the historical record, the space agency’s leadership made the call to keep the JWST named after James Webb, who’s not a notable astronomer like other telescopes’ namesakes, but who was a bureaucrat who oversaw NASA during an era of homophobic policies and discrimination. It’s a poor naming choice for a $10 billion monument, in my opinion. This was my most popular story over the past month.
Commercial Spaceflights Promise to Advance Science. But Do They?
SpaceX, Blue Origin, Axiom and Virgin Galactic talk about science on their commercial human spaceflights, but how much science is really going on? More than I realized, turns out. But I’m still a bit skeptical about their claims, and I still think they’re more about bolstering the industry and drawing attention to celebrities and billionaires.
Now that the Moon Capsule Orion is Back on Earth, What Happens Next?
The inaugural mission of the Artemis program seems to have been a big success, and the delays, budget problems and fuel leaks are now in the past. So what do NASA and its international and commercial partners have to do to send astronauts to the moon and assemble a lunar space station? I lay out the long-term picture in this story.
In other writing…
Good science books of 2022
If you’re looking for a last-minute holiday gift for someone (or yourself), I recommend How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler, Vagina Obscura by Rachel Gross, An Immense World by Ed Yong, and Pests by Bethany Brookshire. Smithsonian and Science News magazines have other recommendations too.
The demon river
This feature story in Hakai magazine reminds me a bit of John McFee’s The Control of Nature. Here J.B. MacKinnon writes about people’s limited control of British Columbia’s Nicola River, which burst its banks one year ago.
Journey to the doomsday glacier
Antarctica’s rapidly-retreating Thwaites Glacier, the widest glacier in the world, will reshape the world’s coastlines as global warming melts it. It’s a climate problem in itself, and as David Brown writes in the New Yorker, it’s a challenging journey for researchers just trying to get there.
We need to work much harder to stop climate change, for our sake and our children’s. In a different New Yorker piece, Bill McKibben critiques desperate geoengineering schemes aimed at dimming the sun. But I believe organizing, not risky technologies, can save us from climate doom.
Boomtown
To quickly ramp up the generation of renewable energy, I’m all for building solar and wind farms wherever we can. But it’s more complicated than that. When it comes to public lands, like those in Nevada highlighted in this Harper’s magazine piece by Hillary Angelo, we need to be careful deciding whether such renewable energy development makes sense, while avoiding mistakes of the past.
Can AI write authentic poetry?
People have designed artificial intelligence programs to do all sorts of things, including some cases of writing compelling prose. Is poetry next? Cognitive psychologist and poet Keith Holyoak argues in the MIT Press Reader that AI probably won’t be able to do so, but we’ll see.
What I’m reading: Lost Children Archive, a novel by Valeria Luiselli.
Looking back: I ended 2021 by writing about the dawn of commercial human spaceflight and how much it’s actually expanding access to space. Stay tuned for my final piece of 2022, coming out next week, about why we should (or shouldn’t) go to Mars at all.
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and I’ve recently moved from San Diego to the Bay Area. I used to be a freelance writer and journalist, and before that, an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter @raminskibba. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.