Airtight Security.

James Nicoll has come up with a brilliant way to prevent the kind of mess that we saw in Toronto on the weekend:  Hold G20 summits on the International Space Station.  The Black Bloc idiots would have a pretty hard time causing trouble when space travel costs far more than they can afford, and the cost of flying the leaders to the ISS is likely less than what was spent on a questionable security effort.  And just think what kind of boost it would give space travel in the public eye.

"I won't go and you can't make me!"

NASA has decided that they won't repair damage to the space shuttle Endeavour's heat shielding tiles before it returns to Earth next week. Hearing that made me wonder what NASA might do if one of the crew were to decide that they won't come back to Earth on the shuttle because of that damage. After all the shuttle is docked to the International Space Station. Would they attempt to force the person onto the shuttle? Let them stay on the ISS until its next scheduled crew change, which would no doubt have to be moved up because of the extra supplies another resident on the ISS would use up? Certainly they hope that such a scenario never happens given the kind of troubles they've been having of late, troubles that have brought a lot of negative attention to the agency.

I Won't Meet You On Tau Ceti VI Next Year.

Science fiction writer Charlie Stross has written an interesting piece on why interstellar colonisation may not be doable. The responses are equally interesting. Frankly I think too many of them hinge on the flawed argument that since we now have X when Y years ago we believed it was impossible or didn't even conceive of then there's no doubt that solution Z will come along and solve everything. It's also amusing that some people can't get the idea that writing about something in a work of science fiction doesn't automatically mean the writer believe's it's actually possible in the real world. As is often the case they seem to place an overemphasis on the "science" part of science fiction.

Given that fusion power has supposedly been a decade away for six decades I don't think I'll hold my breath waiting for a hyperspace drive system to appear.