The case for exploration. The three most successful, though hardly surefire, means for defeating the dead weight of stifling habit typified by bureaucracies are war, technology, and discovery. Which gets us, finally, to Mars… This got me thinking about how much our culture could use some good old-fashioned exploration. How many bad habits

Preparing the law for settling on Mars. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty has traditionally been viewed with near-veneration by the space community. And the treaty did many worthwhile things: it forbade placing nuclear weapons in orbit or on the Moon, it established ground rules for liability and registration of spacecraft, and it set forth the principle that outer space should be open to anyone, without regard to nationality. These provisions are still valuable, but it was the “no sovereignty” provision of Article 2 that got the most attention, and that has done the most harm.