Asteroid miners – still Earthbound for now. Image courtesy NASA
Recently, I received an email from Planetary Resources with the subject line, “Now hiring asteroid miners.” About time, it seemed to me. The first space geologist has been waiting 40 years for someone to go back out there. Astrogeologists still have to wait.
The Martian Rover Curiosity has been making slow headway on its long drive up Mount Sharp. But what if it finds evidence of life on Mars, and what if we later find that life there still exists. Does that put an end to any thoughts of terraforming? Mars off-limits?
Astrogeologists still have to wait to leave Earth Recently, I received an email from Planetary Resources with the subject line, “Now hiring asteroid miners.” About time, it seemed to me. The e-mail said the company was looking for college students for co-op positions, and I thought of forwarding it to my niece studying geology at more »
We didn’t sleep much that night on the beach, my brother, my cousin and I – and several thousand other people. We kept staring across Indian River at that gleaming needle of white on the Atlantic shoreline of the Kennedy Space Center, a rocket bathed in the brilliant glare of searchlights that surrounded the launch more »
When Curiosity shakes off all the dust from landing and completes all its system checks, it will begin its one-year trek (by the Martian calendar) up Mount Sharp, with one of its aims to discover if Mars was ever habitable for primitive life. What if it was? Wow! Great, what a find! What if the more »
This has been a long time coming, but finally I’ve launched a Kickstarterr funding campaign to publish my novel, Lunar Dust, Martian Sands, and its audio short-story prequel, Shalbatana Solstice. I’ve been leading up to this for a while. In fact, for the novel, it’s been years. I believe now the timing is right, both more »
There is a new space race. It’s hard to tell who the leaders are as this new race is in its early stages. The entrants are still jockeying for position and getting used to the track. But the rest of this decade could be the beginning of an exciting time off Earth. Some politicians and more »
Hard sci-fi has a reputation for being almost exclusively about science and tech, with people only thrown in for context. I don’t buy it, and I don’t buy stories which take that approach. Unfortunately it’s a reputation reinforced by some authors who do embrace that idea and fill their stories with techno-overdrive. These authors meticulously more »
Two views of leisure in space came across the Martian Sands news feeds a couple of weeks back. One, reported on Space.com and a number of other news organizations, was the illustrated fantasy vision from Playboy and Virgin Galactic of the ultimate pleasure palace, or in this case wheel-shaped space station, going around the world more »
(First in a series of interviews speculating on life 100 years from now.) A faint trail of beeps from the sky in the mid-20th century saved Anthony Leggett from a career in classical philosophy. Those beeps led him instead to a Nobel Prize in physics in the first decade of the 21st century, awarded to more »
Laptops, e-readers, iPads and any external electronic device may be gone in the blink of an eye. Just a blink, and any website, background info or ebook we just think about accessing will be there, projected on contact lenses and controlled with a direct connection to our brains. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but more »
This is going to be an ambitious website, but there’s no use putting one up if you’re not gong to be ambitious. The tag line in the header says it. I want to look at life 100 years from now, not that I nor anyone I bring in can claim to have a crystal ball. more »