9unm3741

I have finally gotten my first publication accepted by the journal "Space Policy"!  They have to draw up proofs to send to me for final approval before working out when it will be published, but it has been accepted and the publication is definite.  The title is rather a mouthful, "Redefining Safety in Commercial Space:  Understanding Debates over the Safety of Private Human Spaceflight Initiatives in the United States".  As the title indicates, I examine the debate over the safety of commercialization of human spaceflight.  I don't determine whether it is safe or not.  I don't have access to the immense amounts of data needed for that, nor do I have the expertise to interpret it even if I did.  This expertise may not even be possible considering the complexity of spaceflight systems (an issue I do address).  Nor do I take a side for public or private spaceflight.  If you're curious I think some third way would probably be the most appropriate, but one thing I do argue is that describing this debate as public vs private may be an overly simplistic descriptor.  My task is to examine how various actors within this debate define safety (i.e. how safe is safe enough?  how do you tell if its safe?  How do you run an organization to make it safe?).  From this, I examine the various political motivations for these various definitions and how that impacts policy making.

I've been working on getting this paper published for about 3 years now.  I'm very happy to finally have it off my plate.  Just not knowing how to write for a journal (as opposed to for a class) was a big factor in this.  I also started when I was still in physics, and didn't know anything about social science methods, having to learn them as I went and making lots of mistakes that cost me lots of time.  Trying to balance this with the immense workload of graduate school also meant that there was a lot of time when I just wasn't making any headway.  But now its done!  Yay!

For the sake of posting on here regularly, and in order to have at least one short(ish) post...

I found out in 2009 that the space community and transhumanists are very closely linked. I didn't realize until recently, however, just how closely linked. Suffice it to say that transhuman ideas of the singularity and technological progressivism are a huge part of what drives the American space program. This is worrisome. Aside from the moral issues of transhumanism itself, this movement is also heavily associated with laissez-faire economics. Beyond this, the whole movement is extremely unreflexive which possibly (likely) influences the space program to be equally unreflexive about space exploration. Until this point I had always thought that transhumanists were either a minority or a fringe element of the space community that I could avoid with few consequences. I am beginning to get the impression, however, that the future will require me to not just interact with, but actively come in conflict with transhumanists within the space community. This is a rather unnerving prospect. Not that transhumanists are inherently bad people (those that I know are actually extremely cool folks) but going against the professional and social grain is never an easy thing. So I am worried about the future of American space exploration, and not just the usual funding woes.