Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
Today we take international cooperation pretty much for granted when it comes to spaceflight---last year an Israeli moon probe hitched a ride aboard an American SpaceX rocket, to name just one example, and of course the ISS continues to fly with the participation of eighteen different countries. This is the obvious way of doing things.... Continue Reading →
Hello, everyone! Today I have a guest post by my friend Eamon K. Minges, author of the upcoming novel Paradigm's End from Kindle Direct Press. He'll be examining various energy-efficient methods of orbital launch, comparing their merits, and discussing their possible applications. With no further ado: Part 1: Tsiolkovsky's Tyranny For over sixty years, humans... Continue Reading →
This may be a controversial statement, but any ship large enough to support a crew is too large to be a realistic option for interstellar travel. That means you, ISV Venture Star. Even though you're beautiful. Space is big, unfathomably big, and the problem of venturing between stars has occupied theorists for quite a long... Continue Reading →
Last week I posted a review of the 1963 film A Dream Come True, about a Soviet expedition to Mars, and today I'm going to share the Mars mission the Soviets were actually planning when that movie came out. It was... ambitious, to say the least. "Nuclear-powered Mars train from pole to pole" levels of ambitious.... Continue Reading →
The Space Race was a wild time, especially in its early years, when the United States was shocked and humiliated by Sputnik and Gagarin, and threw money at various insane ways to take the lead. I've already written about the proposed one-way trip to the Moon; other highlights include an inflatable re-entry pod and flying to... Continue Reading →
Somewhere between the current human presence in the space—zilch, save for three people aboard the ISS—and the most ambitious, wide-eyed, optimistic visions for colonization—Musk's million people on Mars, Bezos' trillions throughout the solar system—there's a middle ground where we work on and explore other planets, but inhabit them only in the same sense that we... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: The Apollo missions, as intrepid as they were, did not venture into wholly uncharted territory. By the time Neil Armstrong famously planted his boots in the lunar soil, a whole fleet of US spacecraft had already explored and mapped out the globe of the Moon in meticulous detail. There were the... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: I’ve got some tragic news to share today: NASA’s Kepler space telescope, formerly our premier planet-hunter floating in the sky, has ceased operations. This was not due to any technical failure aboard the craft. Rather, it simply ran out of fuel, rendering it unable to conduct stationkeeping or even orient itself... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: I’m sure many of us are familiar with the book and film The Martian, in which NASA ends up with one of its astronauts stranded alone on another world, and has to mount a desperate effort to rescue him. As far as space mishaps go, that is one of the most... Continue Reading →
Post by AJ Rise: Here’s a little bit of neat space technology history: Project Echo was one of the earliest experiments in satellite communication, launched in the 1960s, and it paved the way for communicating satellites, which remain essential to our everyday lives. Echo 1 was the very first passive communications satellite to be launched... Continue Reading →
