Search Results for: Space

NASA is Learning the Best Way to Grow Food in Space

Longreads Pick

Sarah Scoles on how learning to grow food in space is a critical milestone to furthering space exploration, because astronauts simply can’t haul all the food they’ll need to thrive during long absences from Earth.

Source: Popular Science
Published: Jun 6, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,951 words)

Databodies in Codespace

Longreads Pick
Source: Places
Published: Apr 19, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,141 words)

The Space Between Us and the Ground Below Us, or: Why I Traveled to Japan

Longreads Pick

Gaijin find traveling in Japan both daunting and welcoming. Try traveling there black and gay, and yet, for some people, it’s America that feels more foreign.

Source: Catapult
Published: Jan 3, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,353 words)

Does Luxembourg Have Any Business Entering the Space Race?

Members of Luxembourg's royal family on National Day, 2015. (Mark Renders/Getty Images)

Once upon a time in the twentieth century, there was an era called the Space Race, a few glorious decades of scientific discovery in the name of national superiority. But once we got to space, what was there to do? Poke around? Send some cool tunes to the farthest reaches of the solar system? Launch a robot to go to Saturn and then burn it up twenty years later?

Now these activities are fun and good for countries that like to spend money, but what about countries that like to make money? Which will be the first nation to break the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of capitalism? The answer, as it turns out, could be Luxembourg,

Luxembourg is a small but savvy nation. With few natural resources — besides its valuable national sovereignty — the country has looked to the stars for its next big venture: asteroid mining. At The Guardian, Atossa Abrahamian lays out the galactic ambitions of a country that has fashioned itself as as tax haven to craft a thriving economy.  When it comes to legal loopholes, space may be the final frontier.

By crafting innovative rules, laws and regulations that only it could (or would) put on offer, Luxembourg has attracted banks, telecommunications companies and consulting firms before any of these industries came to dominate the global economy. Now, by courting asteroid miners before anyone else takes them seriously, it may very well end up doing the same thing for the commercialization of space…

The only catch was the ambiguity of space law: companies wanted assurances that the fruits of their extraterrestrial labour would be recognized here on Earth. This is not a given. Unlike on Earth, where a country can grant a company a mining concession, or a person can sell the right to exploit their land, no one has an obvious legal claim to what’s outside our atmosphere. In fact, the Outer Space Treaty, signed by 107 countries at the UN in 1967, explicitly prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies. The question now is: if nobody owns or governs the great unknown, who is to say who gets to own a little piece of it?

Read the story

How a Tax Haven is Leading the Race to Privatize Space

Longreads Pick

Luxembourg is a small but savvy nation. With few natural resources — besides a long line of grand dukes, a legacy of skirting tax loopholes, and a valuable national sovereignty — the country has looked to the stars for its next big venture: asteroid mining. The only problem? The 1967 Outer Space Treat explicitly prohibits countries from claiming ownership of any object in space, including asteroids.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 15, 2017
Length: 21 minutes (5,300 words)

Manspreading Writ Large: Rebecca Solnit on Space

(Richard Yeh / WNYC)

In Harper’s, Rebecca Solnit explores space and boundaries: Who has access to what spaces, with what limitations? What does this mean for those who are excluded, and what does this exclusion mean for society as a whole? How do we claim the space to which we have a right without falling victim to the self-importance of entitlement?

Almost twenty years ago, while taking care of a friend’s dog, I took the animal out for a stroll. Along the way, three tall young men came walking directly toward us, a situation in which I always give way, step aside. But I had a pit bull on a short leash. I walked right through those men like Moses parting the Red Sea. I never tried that again, but I never forgot what I learned in that moment: So deeply had I known who owned the sidewalk that I’d always yielded, without even noticing. Since then, I’ve read accounts of trans women who found, after their transition, that they were constantly bumping into people or being bumped into—as women they no longer owned the right of way.

… It’s easy to see how readily this feeling of urgency could become a sense that everyone else is in your way, that your rights and needs matter more—could become, ultimately, the sort of self-absorption that renders others invisible. To believe that my important business is more important than others’ is the path of entitlement, the antithesis of any ideal of equality.

Read the essay

Welcome to Chef Jordan Kahn’s Anti-Locavore Fine-Dining Spaceship

Longreads Pick

As many chefs focus on local foods, Jordan Kahn in Los Angeles sources in a galaxy far, far away to create a futuristic, immersive, all-consuming experience.

Source: GQ
Published: Jun 7, 2017
Length: 6 minutes (1,619 words)

Welcome to Airspace

Longreads Pick

How the same design language — “the neutered Scandinavianism of HGTV” — took over coffee shops and Airbnbs from Brooklyn to Osaka.

Source: The Verge
Published: Aug 3, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,601 words)

Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces

Longreads Pick

While visiting national parks to detox from the oppressive whiteness of the MFA experience, Minda Honey is reminded the only places to retreat from whiteness in this country are the spaces women of color hold for each other.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 29, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,986 words)

Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Minda Honey | Longreads | March 2017 | 12 minutes (2,986 words)

“And sometimes you meet yourself back where you started, but stronger.”
—Yrsa Daley-Ward

I sat alone at a picnic table sipping a hot can of beer in Sequoia National Park under the stingy shade of a nearby tree. I was surrounded by families. White families. Sequoia was the first of four national parks I had planned to visit on my summer road trip from Southern California to a writer’s retreat in Lake Tahoe, and from Lake Tahoe to my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. I needed to get out and away. I’d just completed two years as a POC in an MFA program. Two years in classrooms at long tables surrounded by faces as white as the paper we printed our work on. I felt like the black text on that paper, forcefully marching across the landscape of my peers’ white lives.

I’d decided to spend four weeks as a woman of color in wide-open spaces detoxing from whiteness. But when I pitched my tent, I hadn’t known that about 80% of National Parks visitors and employees are white. Essentially, I’d leapt from the Ivory Tower into a snowbank. I should have known that Black folks weren’t the target audience for all those memes about the cleansing, revitalizing effects of the Great Outdoors. I should have known from the people in the images. Always white people in zip-up North Face fleeces, stretchy yoga pants, and hiking boots. But I didn’t know, and I gassed up my car and went.

It was July, the busiest time of year for the National Park Services. A narrow road ran past my campsite and the gravel grumbled in protest at the occasional passing car. No one bothered me. No one acknowledged me. I was just a lone Black woman day-drinking at a picnic table. I’d drained three cans with no buzz before realizing it was only 3% alcohol. It would do nothing to calm my anxiety about spending my first night in a tent alone.

The only other Black person I’d seen at the park was with his white wife and their children. As they ushered their brood onto the path that led to the giant sequoias, I heard him speak and suspected he was African. I’m not sure if he saw me, if he was tallying Black bodies like I was. Read more…