August 2018
Measuring the pulse of Mars
... have enabled a wide variety of missions, success with MarCO will enable similar imaginative, cutting-edge missions in interplanetary space.” In the meantime though, for MarCO it is so far so good as shortly after take-off NASA reported that...
January 2018
Cosmic cocktails and galactic moonshine
... almost inevitably travel into the expanse with future settlers and will eventually be manufactured at their new interplanetary homes. Space will present a whole raft of challenges for alcohol production. When European settlers arrived in the...
January 2017
Blueprint for NASA’s journey to Mars
..., contingency lifeboat, and integral Earth re-entry vehicle. Mars Base Camp composite illustration For a first human interplanetary mission, system redundancy and self-rescue capability is essential. Aborts from low-Earth orbit (LEO) take...
October 2019
Electric orbit raising and space weather
... into the Earth’s magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds the planet and acts as a protective barrier to interplanetary space. Once here, the movement of the charged particles becomes constrained by electromagnetic forces that arise from...
February 2020
Preserving our space heritage
... in satellite constellation design, and has been a fellow of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the British Interplanetary Society for more than 25 years. Acknowledgement The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Chas Simpson...
May 2017
Growing plants without gravity
... for deep space flight but, in his 1926 works Outside the Earth and Plan for Conquering Interplanetary Space, he also suggested the construction of a cylindrical space greenhouse in order to obtain oxygen, food and clean the...
