The View From Missive Control

This issue, I have to say, is one of the more exciting I’ve gotten to put together. As you probably saw on the cover, we start off with Darrell Coles’ look at the world of finance in the space industry. This is the first of what Darrell promises will be an in-depth look at the field in a series of articles.

Seth Potter returns to the pages of SFN with his much awaited primer on solar power satellites. For anyone who is confused or curious about the subject, I found this to be an excellent basic text.

Several weeks back, Alan Wasser approached me with a fax that he had received from Jeffrey Liss out in Chicago. The fax was a copy of a proposal that Jeffrey put together for The Earthguard Project, following up on the speculation that Earth could one day (soon?) find itself in the path of an oncoming spatial body – like Shoemaker-Levy 9. I followed up with a couple conversations with Jeff, and hope I’ve done his proposal justice in the space allotted.

Our regular contributors, of course, are with us – Robin Vernuccio with her usual witty review style, Carolyn Jospehs and her 11th hour column on the upcoming Space Science Technologies Opportunities conference – I add to her exhortations – let’s all pitch in and be there this coming weekend! And Greg Zsidisin catches us up on what’s happening with ISDC ’96 here in New York.

From this end, I’m looking for a volunteer or volunteers to write a series of articles on space advocacy in the online world. If you’re active out there on the Internet, or elsewhere, and have some aspect that you’d like to cover for us, or just an opinion you want to express, let me know. On other promised topics, I’m in mid-read on Marshall Savage’s The Millennial Project, so far, I can say it’s a “must read”. More next month.