Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
"Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. 'Corona Mundi . . . Roof of the World . . .'" Long ago, in a simpler, more wholesome era---fall 2011, to be... Continue Reading →
I don't think I've really made it clear on this blog before, but I am, in fact, a huge Trekkie. Been one ever since I can remember. In kindergarten, I spent a day painting my rendition of the duel between the Enterprise and the Reliant, and in third grade, I would zealously record reruns of... Continue Reading →
Happy 2021! A new year dawns, as tends to occur every January. Opportunities beckon, fresh challenges present themselves, and, perhaps, hope dares to appear after the nightmare of 2020... it is certainly quite the time to be alive. Anyway, on to the post! One thing that you'll find to be conspicuously absent on this site... Continue Reading →
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four defined the dystopian genre1. It became one of the greatest fictional examples of a totalitarian government ruling through fear and force, permeating every last aspect of its citizens' lives, and it tackled complex themes about individuality, resistance, and even the nature of reality itself. Altogether, the book is a timeless classic,... Continue Reading →
A couple posts ago, I reviewed a book about an expedition to Titan---arguably the most interesting celestial body in the Solar System---and I'd like to continue in that theme this week, turning my attention to a real, official Titan exploration project under development at NASA: the Dragonfly mission. Dragonfly will be a quadcopter aircraft sent... Continue Reading →
Oddball mission studies are my jam. Sometimes, they are NASA's jam, too---the agency is not afraid to occasionally explore the more speculative topics, spacecraft which rely on advanced technologies and are many decades away from ever seeing implementation. I stumbled across one such study when I was doing some reading on Pluto the other day.... Continue Reading →
My search for good indie sci-fi novels goes on. It is a perilous test of literary endurance, an endless journey through a wilderness of Kindle previews---perhaps an expedition into the heart of darkness itself. Some days I doubt I shall return with my health or sanity intact... Just kidding. There is no place for snobbery... Continue Reading →
I really don't watch much TV. Movies, sure; books, I'll devour; but TV is a medium that I've found difficult to get into, with very few shows holding my attention. Partly, this is because most modern television is very popular and I'm the sort of ivory-tower nerd who prefers obscure things, but it's also because... Continue Reading →
After decades of messing around in low Earth orbit, and several false starts (I shed a tear for Project Constellation), the 2020s may finally be a spaceflight renaissance. NASA's always-ambitious plans are now backed up by real, concrete progress in the private space sector. SpaceX has a feasible roadmap to go to Mars, though the... Continue Reading →
Space travel was at the center of the Soviet psyche, and key to the communist vision of the future. Humans would one day expand across the whole cosmos, exploring and building among the stars, and the socialist countries, particularly the USSR, would lead the way. All humanity would eventually join hands in plunging into the... Continue Reading →
