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This issue we are varying the format of this regular feature a bit to expand the number of links and to tie them all together around the subject of Dr. T.A. Heppenheimer, the renowned science and technolgy historian, aerospace engineer, scientist, advocate of space colonization and writer about diverse subjects who graduated from Cristobal High. Why this focus, and why now? Because between this issue and the next one  Heppenheimer will be coming back to Panama for a visit and a couple of speaking engagements, to be sponsored by The Panama News, the Panama Historical Society et al.

The following is an article about the business of high tech start-ups, written in the early 90s before the dot-com bubble expanded and burst. Whether Panama has possibilities in the space industry as it is now moving is not only a technological matter and an issue closely related to the quality of Panamanian education, but it's also very much a business question.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/10275/

The link below is to some later work by somebody else, on the dynamics of binary stars. Heppenheimer made his contribution to this part of astrophysics about three decades ago.

http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/planetf04/kokubo/pdf/Kokubo.pdf

When a writer gets accused of fraud by Lyndon LaRouche, that's usually a sign that she or he has hit the nail on its head! On the following page, LaRouche takes Heppenheimer to task for being insufficiently worshipful of nuclear scientist Edward Teller. Heppenheimer doesn't think much of LaRouche either. The article that aroused the perennially irrelevant presidential candidate's wrath is not published online, but basically argued that Teller had one good idea about nuclear fusion but otherwise didn't accomplish a lot in his life.

http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2000/2750_teller.html

Below is the link to a 2004 article in the libertarian publication Reason about nanotechnology and the likely ethical and political controversies that will accompany its development.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_10_35/ai_n6002901

This is a 2005 article about a soon to be abandoned edifice, the support structure for the Space Shuttle. Dr. Heppenheimer was the independent science historian upon whom NASA called to write its two-volume history of the shuttle at a difficult time when any in-house uncritical panegyric would have seriously increased the institution's political troubles.

http://inventionandtechnology.com/xml/2005/2/it_2005_2_feat_0.xml

Space Quotes to Ponder --- one of these is by Dr. Heppenheimer, but he says that he no longer believes it.
There is not much doubt that eventually our sun will change, making our planet uninhabitable. But colonizing space to avoid humanity's extinction by that process is beside the point, he now thinks, because most species don't last that long and he sees no compelling reason to think that humanity will be an exception to the trend. It's not that we're likely to blow ourselves up, he thinks, but that our fertility is likely to dwindle.

http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space/quotes.htm

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