Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
Ranking the Star Trek movies is always a fraught question. Wars have started that way. You can hop onto message boards dating two decades back, and see countless battles between angry fans at the dawn of the internet---like the clash of titans when the world was young1. Their disputes still echo: is Wrath of Khan... Continue Reading →
Nuclear power has had a long and complex history in outer space. Starting in the 1960s, both the US and USSR deployed full-on fission reactors aboard Earth-observing satellites; more recently, high-profile probes---Cassini, Curiosity, New Horizons---have all used safer but far less powerful radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which extract energy from the waste heat of decaying... Continue Reading →
A think piece for today: If you want to get a rise out of space nerds, bring up Mars colonization1. These days it's the subject of countless op-eds and heated Facebook discussions. The Elon Musks and Robert Zubrins of the world are fierce proponents, viewing the expansion of humanity as a matter of survival; on... Continue Reading →
Hello, all! I'm following up on last week's book review with... another book review! I've been reading a ton lately, so you're probably going to get a lot of these---and where Deep Black was sci-fi, the usual theme for this blog, today's exploration is in another genre entirely: alternate history. We will be taking a... Continue Reading →
Hello, all! I have returned from my hiatus---and now that I've wrapped up my hectic school term, I ought to have ample time to blog during the long, hot summer. Let's kick things off again with another book review! You may remember my post on the novel Mission One, by Samuel Best. I deemed it... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
Let's Get Off This Rock Already! 