Posts

Posted on

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.”

https://www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk/carnegie-speech

Posted on

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.”

Becoming A Space-faring Civilization Starts at Home and in the Classroom - Star Letters
Becoming A Space-faring Civilization Starts at Home and in the Classroom - Star Letters

The world is changing for better and for worse. Humans are facing an enormous amount of challenges at all corners of the planet. Starvation, displacement, and psychological distress are prominent due to lasting conflict on almost every continent. Nationalism and xenophobia seems to have risen again in the wake of terror and violence in our…
Star Letters
Posted on

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.


We've got some trouble | 403 - Access Denied

We’ve got some trouble | 403 – Access Denied

www.space.com www.space.com
Posted on

Clair de Lune

I found this profoundly moving. Clair de Lune is always one of those prickly hair on the back of the neck songs for me. But this takes it to an entirely new level.

Bravo, NASA Goddard.

Posted on

More about terraforming

Here’s a recent webinar on terraforming Mars from the NASA MAVEN Mission to Mars youtube channel. The TL;DR is that it will be monumentally difficult, but sooner or later we are likely to try it. In the meantime, we shouldn’t get hung up on the feasibility of the endeavour as we make plans for exploring and colonizing Mars.

Along the way is a great deal of information on the history of Mars, including the questionable relevancy of its lack of magnetic field, and details on what it would take to terraform a planet.