Author: Robert Bell
June 8, 2022
“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” So wrote the Lebanese poet and artist Kahil Gibran. I was of a generation that read his book "The Prophet" in my teenage years, when I thought it profound, and threw it away in my college years, finding it treacly and…
October 5, 2021
The economist Herbert Stein once wrote, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” The question, of course, is when. It can be an exasperating question. Human beings have a talent for knowing about a problem, talking about it until we are blue in the face, and yet doing nothing about it, sometimes for…
July 13, 2021
The space business needs to recruit more people who know less. Strange, right? The global pandemic dramatized how important skills are to personal economic progress. As states and countries locked down, those with the high-skilled jobs that could be done from home came out ahead. Those whose jobs required them to be face to face…
December 11, 2020
The satellite business has developed a bandwidth obsession. Really, it’s nothing to apologize for. After decades as one of the most capacity-constrained communications technologies, the industry has lately been enjoying an explosion of effective bandwidth on orbit. First it was Geostationary High-Throughput Satellites (GEO, HTS), then Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), then the coming rush of GEO…