Mars test rover in the Mojave Desert.
NASA and JPL scientists and technicians are test driving a stripped down model of the rover Curiosity in the Mojave Desert to get ready for Curiosity’s August landing on Mars. More on the News Page.
A new space race has government playing only a supportive role, with the real visionaries coming from the ranks of rocket-propelled entrepreneurs. May 14 Blog
MartianSands calls for readers to recommend sci-fi books, and seeks submissions from authors on short stories. See the blog “Tripping fantastic in hard sci-fi” for details, and the Bookstore page for submission guidelines.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
(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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]