A Chinese satellite is reported to have grappled another Chinese satellite, which had ceased to function, and towed it into a graveyard orbit. On the surface this would seem to be good news, given that certain very useful (and therefore very valuable) orbits are becoming cluttered with old, worn-out equipment that makes it difficult to utilize ( Read more... )

It starts with a seemingly innocuous trip -- a year teaching English in South Korea, a way to pay off some of the ever-growing credit card and student loan debt that was crushing Young Chun, the American-born son of Korean immigrants. After all, South Korea was a modern, democratic country, no more dangerous for an American than traveling in most ( Read more... )

Today is 11-11-18, exactly a century after the guns fell silent on what was called the War to End All Wars. It laid waste to a vast stretch of land in northwestern France, and it laid waste to a generation. There are schools in Germany, France and the UK that lost their entire graduating classes of fighting-age men ( Read more... )

One last interesting bit from the Fencon programming schedule, and then I'll wind it up.

The imagery of space warfare goes back to the Golden Age of science fiction, to the Buck Rogers serials, to Flash Gordon and all those stories of derring-do. And then it was pretty well cemented by Star Wars and Babylon 5So most of us, when asked to imagine a ( Read more... )

Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, when the US Navy turned the tide of World War II in the Pacific. From that point forward, the Japanese military was fighting a defensive rather than offensive war.

in which the US Air Force has more drone pilots than pilots actually in a plane's cockpit.

Is the end of the traditional balls-to-the-wall throttle-jockey fighter pilot over for good? Or will it turn out that some things really need someone right there, not seated in a nice safe room hundreds or thousands of miles away?