Sci­ence Fic­tion and the Drake Equa­tion I start­ed think­ing about one of the clas­sic authors of sci­ence fic­tion, and the set­ting he cre­at­ed for some of his sto­ries.  I often won­dered what the impli­ca­tions for the Drake equa­tion would be in that par­tic­u­lar set­ting. I’ve tak­en a sub­set of the sto­ries for this set­ting, since […]

Redun­dan­cy See­ing SpaceX’s pro­to­type star­ship explode after launch remind­ed me of the neces­si­ty of redun­dan­cy in launch sys­tems.  I think back 10 years when over a short time span when Orbital, SpaceX, and Roscos­mos all had anom­alies with their car­go mis­sions bound for the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion.  With­out redun­dan­cy in capa­bil­i­ty, a launch fail­ure in […]

Fab­u­lae Lunae: 1. Thun­der Moon Tus­sle Avail­able now at Amazon.com: Thun­der Moon Tus­sle (kin­dle edi­tion) Nils Carmike, a fall­en from grace astro­naut turned smug­gler, forges a new life on the lunar fron­tier. Harassed by the strik­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and demand­ing Deputy Miller, he is faced with fines and con­flict, result­ing in a tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship and ultimatum […]

Pansper­mia Some­thing inter­est­ing occurred in the late 1960’s as part of the Apol­lo pro­gram.  The uncrewed probe Sur­vey­or 3 was land­ed in the Ocean of storms in 1967. Part of the Apol­lo 12 mis­sion, the sec­ond crewed land­ing in 1969, was to retrieve engi­neer­ing sam­ples from Sur­vey­or 3. That mis­sion was a suc­cess, but that […]

Fusion Why is fusion so impor­tant? There are many answers.  One is that it enables many items from sci­ence fic­tion. Space explo­ration itself is rev­o­lu­tion­ized with many dif­fer­ent schemes for fusion engines. The ben­e­fits are main­ly about pow­er. For fusion, there is a lot of it. In sci­ence, one can look at a peri­od­ic table […]

Thun­der Moon Tus­sle is a nov­el that would nev­er have hap­pened if I had fol­lowed my orig­i­nal plan.  I was writ­ing anoth­er nov­el and decid­ed that I need­ed a back­sto­ry told.  That back­sto­ry was­n’t expect­ed to be very long. How­ev­er, that was before I intro­duced Deputy Genevieve Miller. Sel­dom does a char­ac­ter arrives that disrupts […]

A new short vignette by Torn MacAlester: Vul­cani Cinis   Gen­ny plant­ed her face against the liv­ing room win­dow, watch­ing the snow fall. The sky grew dark­er as she mar­veled at the dark snow cov­er­ing the grass. “Can I make a snow­man when it stops snow­ing, Mom?” “Hon­ey, come and sit by me,” said her […]