What does short-term space settlement of the moon look like? Primarily the issue is about resources that would support settlement. Is the real race about who will get to the resources first and how their rights will be safeguarded? Who will get to the water ice to have access to oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel? Who would have the rights to the metallic asteroid “Pschye” to begin in situ construction? Lessons learned from claims on earth to Antarctica/the Arctic and the South China Sea give us cause for concern. Environmental protection has been used as a shield to stymie some of these claims, but how strong are these in the face of commercialization from both private actors and state-backed enterprises? This talk will provide considerations as to the building blocks for the Space Governance System in this new space 4.0 era.

Event Date: 12 / 10 / 2020

America's space program has set forth an ambitious goal: to return to the Moon by 2024 and establish sustainable technology in hopes of someday setting out for the red planet. With space exploration comes an ambitious research portfolio involving multiple fields: life sciences, physical sciences, materials science and biology to name a few. For the research to run smoothly on an extremely tight timeline, there is tremendous coordination between mission control centers around the world, and the scientists and engineers. this talk will provide a broad-based. understanding of how research has evolved on the International Space Station and the physical challenges of performing science on orbit. We will discuss NASAs' roadmap to both the Moon and towards Mars. We will also explain how microgravity itself provides a unique platform for research that cannot be mimicked anywhere on Earth and, finally we will discus some of the top research concerns, most notably, space radiation.

Event Date: 11 / 5 / 2020

Like they do every 20 years, Saturn and Jupiter have been approaching one another in the sky, and next week on the evening of December 21 they will be at their closest (in conjunction). This year's conjunction is a particularly close one - these two planets have not been observable this close in the night sky since the Middle Ages. This talk will go over various aspects of the 2020 conjunction from the elementary to the more complex, and describe how to view the event. As there has been a lot of press about the Star of Bethlehem, there will also be a short discussion as to how unusual the planetary conjunctions were that occurred around the time of Jesus.

Event Date: 10 / 17 / 2020