3 minute read - What's in a name? More than you might think. KMI's first spacecraft needed a title that not only symbolized its mission but also paid homage to the myths of old. After much debate, we landed on "Laelaps"—a name rooted in Greek legend. But what does a mythic hound, destined to catch everything it chases, have to do with space?
Regulation & International Affairs
4 minute read - Most astronauts remark that, once they get into space, the divisions on Earth become far less apparent and it really looks like one whole of humanity. This viewpoint is for a variety of reasons. Possibly because things like border walls and crossing checkpoints are too thin to be viewable from space, or that the land isn’t conveniently colored like the maps and globes we grew up seeing in school. I would add another reason to the list, and that is that because of orbital dynamics it is not possible to effectively secure a region of space as belonging to any one country.
4 minute read - Activity in space has been growing steadily since the first satellite in 1957, but this rate is increasing dramatically as reduced launch costs enable constellations of hundreds and thousands of satellites to be launched quickly. The situation has become one of dangerous disregard for organization, as evidenced by an event on September 2nd, 2019 when the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Aeolus Earth observation satellite had to maneuver out of the way of a Starlink constellation satellite. When this potential collision was uncovered, the two operators struggled to communicate on what combined action should be taken, and while the end effect was thankfully safe, it could easily have resulted in disaster had both sides decided to do nothing.
