Want to Go to the Moon? Now You Can!

Okay, well, you can't. Nobody has a rocket that could do the heavy lifting necessary to send a spacecraft to the moon, and no one has a spacecraft capable of making the journey. But, the U.S Federal Aviation Administration has given the company Moon Express permission to send commercial cargo to the moon.

In the short term, this really doesn't mean much. But in the long term, it means that future Moon-based commercial ventures will be governed by the same laws as companies conducting business in low Earth orbit. There will be no further bureaucracy or red tape, basically, as long as you can pass the FAA inspection, you can send payloads to the Moon and do business without further government interference.

Now, you might not be so thrilled to hear about how the U.S is opening up space to commercialism, depending on your views on such things. But let's be honest. The future of space is commercial. NASA can't do everything, and it shouldn't do everything. So long as NASA's budget remains small, it should be focused more on exploration, and not on colonization and commercialization. But still, increase NASA's budget. Space exploration is cool, and we should be doing more of it.

Martian Gullies Not Water-Based

It's pretty well known that Mars once had plenty of liquid water, and still does, though it doesn't sit around on the surface. But science is strange sometimes. Sometimes, the obvious answer isn't correct. Take the numerous Martian gullies. They look like dry creekbeds, and a lot of scientists sort of assumed that hey, these features that look remarkably like a feature we see on Earth probably formed the same way. They were taken as proof that liquid water existed on the surface of Mars in recent history, and that seemed like the end of the story.

But this is science, and in science, the story never ends. Someone dug deeper, did more research, and concluded that the gullies formed through the constant freezing and thawing of carbon dioxide frost, not liquid water. Using spectroscopy from the HiRISE space probe, scientists discovered no evidence that the gullies had deposited any sort of clay or other mineral associated with running water, and that any clay associated with the gullies were ancient and had been exposed during the formation of the gullies. I take this as a reminder that science is never easy, and that even if the answer seems obvious, you should always check to make sure.