What ethical space exploration looks like, 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.
Nowruz mobarak, everyone! Happy Persian New Year and spring equinox, to all who celebrate.
What Will Ethical Space Exploration Look Like?
Space advocates like to focus on engineering problems, like how to best design rockets, landers and astronaut habitats on other worlds. Those are interesting, but we should be asking crucial ethical questions now too, before the new space age gets under way. Hope you enjoy this Q&A I had with Erika Nesvold, author of Off-Earth and co-editor of Reclaiming Space.
Russia’s Space Program Is in Big Trouble
Six decades ago, the Soviet Union’s space program lofted the first human into orbit, launching the space race. Now Russia’s space program struggles with technical problems, limited budgets, the loss of partnerships, and the looming end of the space station. My new piece here lays out all the problems with a former space superpower, and it was my most popular story in WIRED this month.
How a Beam of Pellets Could Blast a Probe Into Deep Space
Researchers for years have been struggling to find ways to fly spacecraft faster across the vast reaches of space. I’ve highlighted some scientists here working on a laser-pellet-plasma beam to send a probe into interstellar space. This story’s one of a series this year, marking WIRED’s 30th birthday.
The World’s First 3D-Printed Rocket Is About to Launch
A startup called Relativity Space plans to launch a rocket that’s almost entirely 3D-printed on Wednesday night. It could herald a new era of space manufacturing, eventually with 3D printing in orbit, on the moon and on Mars.
In other writing…
What conservation sounds like
I enjoyed this fascinating feature story in bioGraphic magazine about people using AI tools to distinguish bird calls, not just for science but for conservation purposes, too. (It includes some audio/video clips.) By David Dobbs.
The battle for the soul of Buy Nothing
On “Black Friday,” while Americans are together with their families for the Thanksgiving holiday, US companies urge people to become consumers. But the Buy Nothing movement has tried to shift views, including referring to that instead as “Buy Nothing Day.” Here’s an interesting story, by Vauhini Vara in WIRED, about disputes and challenges for the people behind that movement.
The incredible disappearing doomsday
How has our view of the climate crisis evolved over the years? In this piece, Kyle Paoletta makes the case that many journalists give too positive an outlook, based on current data. Maybe he’s right, but personally I agree with climate scientists Michael Mann and Katharine Hayhoe that climate doomism does nobody good.
Also in the new issue of Harper’s magazine is a piece by Tom Vanderbilt about the science of the perfect second, on research on time and how we define it. As a kid, I remember visiting the atomic clock in Boulder that he mentions in the story.
Seven hours on a chairlift
As a kid, I remember skiing on so many powdery days, only paying $20 for a ticket or using my annual pass. But today, skiing isn’t the same, with climate change giving us less snow (this year’s an exception) and with skyrocketing prices. But I still love skiing. This piece by Gloria Liu in Outside magazine includes interviews with people, who talk about why they still ski.
What plants are saying about us
Plants sense their environment, learn from it, and engage with their surroundings, which might make them sound conscious, but they’re not. This piece by Amanda Gefter in Nautilus magazine explores some wild ideas about plants, which I’m kind of doubtful of, but I’m curious, too.
What I’m reading: The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick and The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green.
Looking back: One year ago I wrote in WIRED about how the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine could have implications in space, including for Russia’s struggling space program.
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.