Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
I missed some interesting news a couple months ago, and I'm guessing you did, too. The launch of China's Tianwen-2 on May 28 took place without much fanfare. Just one space probe among many. Except, it isn't—China is flexing its muscles with an ambitious two-in-one mission, which will not only expand the nation's scientific knowledge... Continue Reading →
56 years ago today1, Apollo 11 made the first manned landing on another world. Ask the average American about it, and they'll likely be able to name the mission's commander, Neil Armstrong, who famously made his “one small step” speech as he climbed out of the Lunar Module Eagle; they might also remember Edwin “Buzz”... Continue Reading →
An astronomy pop quiz for you: How large does a planet have to be before it can have a natural satellite of its own? It's a trick question, you see. There's no lower limit. In fact, moons aren't just the province of planetary-mass bodies like Jupiter, Pluto, and our own Planet Earth---asteroids have them, too.... Continue Reading →
Robert Zubrin is a persistent man. An engineer, author, and above all, space advocate, he's lobbied for a human voyage to Mars for about three and a half decades now, even as the US government has dilly-dallied its way through various questionable exercises in pork-barrel spending. It's 2025 and human boots haven't even returned to... Continue Reading →
One of the many utopian dreams of the last century was that space travel would become possible not just for carefully selected astronauts, but for the common man. 2001: A Space Odyssey famously depicted a passenger flight to the Moon; the 2004 book Eyewitness: Future promised that by 2020, people would book hotel stays in... Continue Reading →
Some of you may remember my previous posts about secret Apollo missions: Apollo 18, the ill-fated landing which fell victim to rock spiders, and Apollo 20, a joint US-Soviet effort which recovered a living alien from the far side of the Moon. Both are fictional, of course. One is a horror movie, the other a... Continue Reading →
The 1990s were not a good time in the former Soviet Union. When the central government fell, it wasn't just a political collapse, but a collapse of just about everything---the military, the economy, society itself. Ethnic tensions erupted into raging civil wars; rushed free-market reforms threw countless millions into poverty; amid political turmoil, President Boris... Continue Reading →
Very early on, my family instilled in me a love of coffee table books: hefty, hardcover volumes, large enough to double as paperweights or even footstools1, bedecked with photographs and artwork from front to back. Instead of reading straight through, you could open one to whatever page you fancied. They covered all sorts of topics,... Continue Reading →
It was on October 7, 1959, that the dark side of the Moon finally came into the light. Mind you, it was never "dark" in a literal sense; all parts of the Moon undergo a complete day/night cycle, with the far or "dark" side being lit when the near one is in shadow, and vice... Continue Reading →
The Soviet space program was more cautious than people give it credit for. Sure, the Soviets had their share of disasters1, but unless one subscribes to certain theories about lost cosmonauts, they didn't just send people into space without any preparation at all---they sent dogs, first. Scores of them. You see, the epic flight of... Continue Reading →
