Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
Avi Loeb believes aliens are real, and they've visited our Solar System. But this man is no fringe conspiracy theorist, dressed in ratty flannels and a tinfoil hat, broadcasting rants from a pirate radio station in the wilderness—he's a Harvard University professor, who has done world-renowned research on cosmology and astrophysics. This is a serious... 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 →
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 →
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 →
This piece is going to be about something very local. While I know I have a far-flung readership---just last week, I had visitors from Germany, South Korea, Thailand, and Poland, among others---it may still be of use for those of you who will one day visit the great state of Oregon. And for those who... Continue Reading →
Hello again, everyone! I have awakened from my long slumber---not since the ancient year of 2021 have I uploaded anything to this site. Now, that may be due to a combination of procrastination, a busy couple of terms at school, and getting distracted with other projects, but the more interesting explanation is that I was... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
