Month: May 2018

Enlarge / ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti in a Chinese pressure suit during training with Chinese colleagues to practice sea survival off China’s coastal city of Yantai, on 14 August 2017. (credit: ESA–Stephane Corvaja)

At a time when NASA and its partners are trying to decide how long to maintain the International Space Station, China has taken the significant step of inviting the world to its planned orbital station. The China Space Station, or CSS, could become operational as soon as 2022.

"CSS belongs not only to China, but also to the world," said Shi Zhongjun, China's Ambassador to UN and other international organizations in Vienna. "All countries, regardless of their size and level of development, can participate in the cooperation on an equal footing."

Such an announcement represents potentially the greatest soft power threat of the last six decades to US and Russian dominance of spaceflight. In the public announcement of this policy on China's state news service Xinhua, Chinese officials said the country stands ready to help other developing countries interested in space technology—and in having their own space programs.

Enlarge / Artist's rendition of a mobile device exceeding expectations. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty / NASA)

From time to time, Ars performs surveys to help us better understand our audience's attitudes and preferences about various things—and this is one of those times. If you're an IT decision-maker at your company, we would be grateful if you'd take a few minutes and let us know your thoughts.

Here at Ars, we're lucky to have one of the most skilled and technically adept audiences of just about any tech news publication in existence: that's you fine folks! A huge number of you are what the industry calls "ITDMs," or "IT decision-makers"—that most sought-after demographic that decides (or helps decide) whose applications and hardware your employers will end up buying. In fact, no small number of the Ars staff (me included) were ITDMs themselves in a past life, and it's a role we well understand.

ITDMs represent a huge cross-section of employees stretching from system administrators to "C-suite" company officers—it's a role that is often stressful and typically thankless, and it more often than not requires dealing with designed-by-committee requirements that can seem contradictory or insane. Nonetheless, the ITDM role is one around which a whole company can pivot, as the choices ITDMs make directly affect the tools and processes a company uses to generate its revenue.