By Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Urgent action is needed to ensure that Earth orbit continues to be a safe place in which to operate. And industry must take the lead because governments are moving far too slowly to address an increasingly serious problem.

That was the consensus of the panel of experts that debated the issue during last week’s Space Tech Expo. They expressed concerns about the growing number of large satellite constellations and the enormous amount of dangerous debris already in orbit.

Josef Koller, co-founder of the Space Safety Institute, said space is now a fully international arena no longer dominated by a handful of international nations. The figures laid out by Koller and his fellow panelists demonstrated how much more crowded Earth orbit has become:

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The question of how to strengthen the U.S. space industry’s weakened supply chain, which has been battered over the past two years by the global COVID-19 pandemic, was the subject of a panel discussion at the Space Tech Expo last week. The answers boiled down to the Pentagon adopting an agile approach to developing and acquiring technology, and reversing a decades-old trend by industry of outsourcing manufacturing abroad.

LONG BEACH, Calif. (Space Tech Expo PR) — An astronaut holding the world’s record for the most spacewalks during a single mission, a private company planning to reach mars, aerospace industry titans alongside startup ventures, key military and NASA space officials, and thousands of engineers and executives are all planning to visit the Long Beach Convention Center April 1-3, 2014 for what is shaping up to be the biggest commercial space confab ever to hit the Los Angeles region, Space Tech Expo 2014.

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Alan Stern

Editor’s Note: The Space Tech Expo, which runs from May 21-23 in Long Beach, Calif., has published the following Q&A with Golden Spike President and CEO Alan Stern.

Dr Alan Stern, planetary scientist, space program executive, aerospace consultant and author, was elected to be the President and CEO of The Golden Spike Company in 2010. Golden Spike, consisting of former NASA engineers, program managers, Agency executives, and others, is a commercial space corporation planning human lunar expeditions. It made news in December 2012 with its proposal to begin launching passenger flights by 2020, costing $1.5 billion each. In this interview with Space Tech Expo, Dr Stern reveals more details about Golden Spike’s ambitions, why it chose to give crowd funding a chance, and why he believes the entertainment industry is key to the development of future space exploration…

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