Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
The first and only time I ever saw the Grand Canyon was when I was eight years old, traveling through the southwestern United States on a family road trip. I knew roughly what it looked like, of course, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer scale of that thing. It was a sculpted, dizzyingly... Continue Reading →
Happy Fourth of July, everyone! I have a special post for y'all, in the patriotic spirit of this great holiday. Right now, we're at a critical juncture in space history---any month now, we're supposed to see SLS and Starship take flight, after many years of waiting---and it's clear that there's a different energy in the... Continue Reading →
One afternoon in tenth grade, when I was home sick with a nasty cold, I curled up beneath some blankets and watched an old 1950s sci-fi movie about a mission to Mars. I ended up drifting in and out of consciousness through most of it. Afterwards, I only recalled bits and pieces, but the images... 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 →
Sometimes, the underdog really does win against the odds. Sometimes, a small, plucky band of visionaries, armed only with a dream, really can rise to dizzying heights and reshape the world into something better. Sometimes, their success is so profound and transformative that later generations think it was inevitable all along. Mars One was not... 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 →
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: 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 →
Let's Get Off This Rock Already! 