America needs a mission that strains our capabilities, one that’s hard. NASA hard. What in heaven could such a mission be? I’ve been suggesting it throughout this book. It’s the Gravity Well. The next president should enshrine that mission within a vision. It could go something like this...
Read MoreIt really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years.
