How will we keep law and order on Mars? This article digs into various facets of concern, from the physics of hand-to-hand combat in low gravity to the ethical implications of humans living in an environment controlled all the way down to the air they breath. There’s a lot to digest here, but it’s interesting to think about.
The Atlantic An Emmy for Cassini
Getting Science out there! This is really very cool when you think about it.
Mountains of Mars
The volcanic mountains on Mars are truly impressive. Here’s why.
Bombarded with words
Geraldine McCaughrean recently won the UK’s Carnegie Medal for children’s literature. Her acceptance speech gives me a bit more confidence in my prose choices for Scratching the Surface.
“Accessible language is, to me, a euphemism for something desperate. Most of its tyrannies are brought to bear on younger books right now. But blink twice and today’s junior school readers will be in secondary school,armed only with a pocketful of single syllable words, and with brains far less receptive to the acquisition of vocabulary than when they were three or seven or nine… We master words by meeting them, not by avoiding them.”
Space business
Admit it: you’ve always been curious.
Business Insider Reaching the next generation
“The idea of the next generation and beyond being able to choose between a life here on Earth or a life of exploration and research in space is a truly exciting one. But does the next generation know it? Probably not.
…more has to be done to reach folks at a younger age, and really convince them that what they are seeing is not only possible but accessible to them in the future.”
First Man, trailer 2
Coming in October!
Early reviews are looking good.
Mr. Steven
The fairings that surround the payloads at the top of rockets have typically been considered disposable. SpaceX, in its quest to trim every possible bit of waste from the price of lifting things into space, wants to reuse theirs. Mr. Steven is the name of their fairing-catching ship.
Forget the Moon
The Moon is a distraction. We don’t need to go there in order to go to Mars.
“Mars is a far more rewarding target, both philosophically and scientifically, than the moon ever was. So let’s challenge ourselves and go there next.”
Illustration progress, Chapter 4
Illustration for Book One, Scratching the Surface, is well under way. Here is an in-progress sequence of the work on Chapter 4. Continue reading “Illustration progress, Chapter 4”