Can you digress before you even get started?
Let's find out.
Many words in English have alternative meanings, such as the word that forms the title of today's blog. However, the greatest of them all in this department is a word that runs to just three letters. And there's a major clue to what that word is in my previous sentence.
The word is 'run' and, in the 3rd Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the entry on this particular word extends to 75 columns of text! It starts with "to go...
Artemis II aims to send humans around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. At the time of creating this article, the mission is imminent. It could go as soon as February 2026, it may take until April. With a rocket costing billions of dollars and human lives at stake, NASA will only launch when both conditions and preparations are perfect.
So, with all this uncertainty, I thought I'd take a look back at the last time humanity visited the moon…
In December 1972, the Apollo program was...
Life, the Universe and Everything: a question to which the answer is 42… apparently. Today, I'm only going to tackle two thirds of that question, and all based on what we know so far. I'd advise you to strap in.
Astronomers like to joke that their job is simply to "look up". But if you’ve ever stood outside on a clear night, with little or no light pollution and "looked up" you've likely been staggered by all you can see. You might be able to spot a planet, the pole star, name some...
Voyager 1 will soon achieve a cosmic milestone. Allow me to explain…
When you turn on the light in a room it looks like it becomes instantly bright. But that's not quite the case. In reality, light races from the bulb at nigh on 186,000 miles per second, so it doesn't fill the room instantaneously - but it does get mighty close
186,000 miles per second is mind bogglingly fast. At that speed you could circle the Earth seven times in the blink of an eye, or reach the moon in just over a second.
...
You spend years pouring you heart and soul into creating your masterpiece. It becomes everything you'd ever want in a story. It has to be shared with the world. How could anyone not want to read your work?
OK, maybe not everyone has that level of self-belief. Perhaps your work has not been years in the making and, most likely, you're writing in a niche rather than attempting to move the soul of the entire world. But the fact remains that you think that there are people out there who will...
(Image by Steve Gribben/NASA/Johns Hopkins APL)
If you’ve ever dreamed of exploring alien worlds, Titan might just become your next obsession. Saturn’s largest moon is a place of paradoxes: it’s freezing cold, yet brimming with organic chemistry; it’s drenched in methane rain, yet eerily Earth-like in its landscapes. And in 2028, NASA plans to send a flying robot there - not a rover, not a lander, but a drone. A nuclear-powered, eight-rotor, science-packed flying machine called Dragonfly.
Titan...
If you could take a trip into space, where would you go?
Perhaps you wouldn't go at all. Perhaps you might consider the risks too great, be it taking off or the prospect of being surrounded by an environment that could kill you in seconds. That's entirely understandable, but you'd be missing out on a lot.
Maybe you'd be content with just a sub-orbital flight? These are available now (to anyone with several million dollars to spare). Blue Origin's New Shepherd flies passengers to the edge of...
The newly built Vera C. Rubin Observatory is our cosmic sentinel. Based in northern Chile, it is one of the most ambitious astronomical projects of the 21st century. Formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a bit of a mouthful, the observatory was renamed in honour of Vera Rubin whose work provided compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter.
Dark matter is a material whose existence we have inferred, because it cannot be seen directly. Astronomers have done a...
I'm writing this in the summer during a spell of hot weather (yes, even in the UK). So I think it's fitting to write about a spacecraft that's been feeling the heat for quite some time - and it's just achieved a significant milestone.
The Parker Solar Probe is a ground-breaking spacecraft launched on the 12th August 2018, by NASA. Its objective was to fly closer to the sun than ever before and gather data on the solar corona, the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere.
The corona is a halo of...
You will not be surprised to learn that Star Trek ranks amongst my favourite TV shows. I should say that we're not in an exclusive relationship. I'm a fan of Star Wars, Stargate, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, The Expanse… the list goes on and on. I can even be persuaded to watch things without any kind of science fiction element - occasionally.
I hate to break it to people, but I'm far from convinced that Star Trek will ever become a reality. But it has some core themes running through it that I...
The Hubble Space Telescope is 35 years old!
For those who need a reminder, Hubble is a large space-based observatory, and it was launched by NASA in 1990. It orbits the Earth and captures high-resolution images and data in ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light. Red and violet bookend the visible light spectrum i.e. the colours we can see. Ultraviolet is simply shades of violet beyond what we can see and the same applies to Infrared light. Hubble uses this range of light to bring out extra...
Can you steal a spacecraft? Sure you can, in Science Fiction. But, way back in 1959, this actually happened.
The Cold War was raging and the Americans were a long way behind in the space race. Their rivals, the Soviet Union, had put a satellite in orbit and even sent a dog up in a vehicle weighing over a tonne. Even more impressively, they'd also sent spacecraft to the moon.
In contrast, the Americans had only managed to send very small probes into space. The first of these was called...
Pre-launch, my publisher posed some questions to me about the story. For anyone wondering about how it came into being and the thinking behind it this might just be helpful - and entertaining. (But I would write that, wouldn't I?)
Sub-Luminal starts out like your typical science fiction epic with the crew of the Endeavour about to complete their journey as the first humans to colonize a new planet. But then you subvert that by having another group beating them to their destination. Why did you...
This is all very new for me and, as this is the first blog I've put up here, this is all new for you too.
So, at least we're even.
If you've read my bio you'll know that I like all things space. That could be anything from the wonders out in the cosmos to the tech we use to see it, reach it, sense it and sometimes bring it back. So up on here in the coming months I expect you'll find all sorts of things relating to this. But, I have an eclectic taste when it comes to what interests me, so...