Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
Hello! I've been absent for a bit---with midterms bearing down on me, I needed a two-week break---but I'm back with a guest post from my good friend Eamon Minges, who wrote about orbital skyhooks last year. He will be making a case for horizontally launched spaceplanes, as opposed to SpaceX's vertically launched Starship model. Enjoy!... Continue Reading →
On June 20, 1944, a test launch of the German V-2 missile reached an altitude of 176 kilometers, becoming the first object to cross the Kármán line1 and enter space. It was not intended to be a triumph of science; the milestone was simply a byproduct of Nazi weapons research, not recognized for many years.... Continue Reading →
Did you ever hear the tragedy of William Rutledge the astronaut? No? I thought not. It's not a story NASA would tell you. Gather round, dear readers, and listen as I tell you a tale of woe and wonder---the tale of a secret Apollo mission that made contact with aliens, on the dark side of... Continue Reading →
For today's post, we will turn our attention to Earth---not an unprecedented topic for this blog, despite the overall focus on space. In particular I would like to discuss one of the wackier technological ideas of the Cold War, where the United States researched ways to turn its nuclear arsenal into a tool for economic... Continue Reading →
Wherever you see an alien planet in sci-fi films or television, there's always something weird going on in the sky. How else would you know you're not looking at Earth? So in everything from Avatar to Star Wars we get double stars, panoplies of moons, other planets in the same system---so many disks visible even... Continue Reading →
When I was young, Ceres and Pluto were the biggest blank spots on the map of the Solar System. Most of the other interesting places had been long since explored, from Mercury all the way out to the moons of Neptune, but when I opened my astronomy books to the two minor planets, I saw... Continue Reading →
Space navies are among the great tropes of science fiction. Countless works transplant the traditions, tactics, and structures of maritime forces to space opera settings: Star Trek has Starfleet, Space: Above and Beyond has the equivalent of World War II carrier battles, and of course Warhammer 40,000 goes full-on Age of Sail with floggings and... Continue Reading →
Sometimes, the underdog really does win against the odds. Sometimes, a small, plucky band of visionaries, armed only with a dream, really can rise to dizzying heights and reshape the world into something better. Sometimes, the success is so profound and transformative that later generations think it was inevitable all along. Mars One was not... Continue Reading →
Hello, all! This will be something of a silly post today, discussing a film that's a little hard to classify. Is it fantasy? Sci-fi? Comedy? Alternate history? Steampunk? Well, this tale of adventure through a clockwork universe is all of the above, an enchanting and beautifully animated voyage into space as it was once understood.... Continue Reading →
Everyone knows space fighters are an absurd idea, right? It's practically the first rule of hard science fiction: this isn't Star Wars you're writing, so no fighters, period. They make no economic or military sense, and they're exceedingly small and vulnerable, and they're not nearly as maneuverable as you'd think because space has no air... Continue Reading →
