Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
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 →
Post by Nic Quattromani: You know it’s a breathtaking time to be alive when you can Google “space news” and count on dozens of fascinating results instantly flowing into your browser. One such news story, which escaped my attention because Earth science escapes everybody’s attention, is the recent launch of NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land... Continue Reading →
Post by AJ Rise: Biology’s reputation as a “soft” science is ill-deserved. It’s a field of many wonders still unknown to mankind, and endless possibility. I think it likely that many of the technological advancements in the near future will be rooted in the deep study of living systems. Millions of years of evolution have... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: I was browsing the internet today, as I do entirely too often, and I came across this gem of an article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation By "gem," I mean "whiny dumpster fire." Sheesh. Though perhaps I'm not being charitable enough, because the author, Zahaan Bharmal, is at least hesitantly in favor of space colonization,... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: Well, here’s an interesting bit of space news: the Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to launch tomorrow, on August 11. Thus our brave little space probe shall begin its journey to the hottest place within light-years of here. You see, while previous solar observation probes like Ulysses have been content to... Continue Reading →
Let's Get Off This Rock Already! 