On the third anniversary of the Shoemaker-Levy impact, he and his wife were in the Australian outback, where they went every year to search for impact sites.
A crab fisherman in Australia has caused alarm in his outback town by driving around with an unexploded World War II bomb in the back of its pick-up trunk.
Gas from untapped shale deposits in the outback Cooper Basin, he points out, could bring South Australia a share in the bonanza that other states are reaping from the China trade.
To fix this there are now plans to build the world's largest solar array in the Australian outback and then connect the two nations by a nearly 4,000-kilometre undersea cable.