Rusty Flint

Rusty is a science nerd. He has been into academic science all his life, spent his formative years doing less academic things, and now writes about the subject he loves most: the physics of getting to orbit and staying there. Propulsion cycles, staging, orbital mechanics and the engineering trade-offs behind every launch vehicle in the directory are his territory.

He likes the harder and stranger end of the subject. While other space writers cover which startup just raised $50 million, Rusty is writing 3,000-word pieces on why a full-flow staged combustion engine is so hard to build, or what a nuclear-thermal upper stage would really buy you. He thinks we are in the 1950s of spaceflight all over again, and that the interesting questions are still open.

He also writes for Quantum Zeitgeist on the foundations of quantum mechanics. The common thread is a refusal to skip the hard part: if a claim rests on a number, the number is in the piece. At New Space Tracker he owns the rockets, propulsion, exploration and spaceflight-history desks.