“Privatizing” Space

Companies Shoot for the Stars, but Uncle Sam Still Pays the Bills

Later this week, a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX, a young company founded by Elon Musk, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The rocket will carry a Dragon capsule, also built by SpaceX, to the International Space Station. This is being hailed as a conspicuously important achievement because SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002 with money from his share of PayPal, is a private company. The temptation to celebrate the privatization of space exploration–the unleashing of all those entrepreneurial billionaires to take us where we haven’t …

by Konstantin Kakaes | May 16, 2012

My Horrific Philosophy

How 20th-Century Science Made Everything—Even Our Monster Movies—Much, Much Scarier

by Steven Palmer Peterson | October 30, 2011

Fourteen years ago, way before I’d penned my first horror-movie script, I found myself studying the philosophy of science at Rutgers. It was something I pursued because it combined the …

The Purpose of Science Fiction

by Robert J. Sawyer | January 31, 2011

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is generally considered the first work of science fiction. It explores, in scientific terms, the notion of synthetic life: Dr. Victor …