01 August 2019
Apollo’s Muse; the Moon in the age of photography
...an image of an Atlas launch. In between are early sketches of the Moon made through telescopes, film stills and science-fictional guesses at its surface characteristics, blurred TV images from 1969 and equally blurred artistic renderings. Readers may...
01 October 2019
Life on Mars: what to know before we go
... existing life on Mars. After the typical sections on science fiction and Schiaparelli’s ‘canals’, which seem de rigeur for ...any Mars book, the author gets down to the science of “Chlorophyll, Lichens and Algae”, Mars meteorites and methane....
16 April 2020
China in Space
...Although this sounds a bit like the premise for a science fiction drama, much of the latter will feature unmanned scientific ... leading innovator by 2030…and the world-leading power in science and technology by 2049”, the centenary of the founding of...
01 April 2020
Alcohol in Space
...”. Following a brief history of alcohol and society, this light-hearted but informative book delves into “booze in science fiction” and “the history of drinking in space”. From Star Trek’s Romulan Ale to Hitchhiker’s Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster...
15 June 2020
The Contact Paradox
...that an index will be included, which would lift the book from being simply interesting to being useful. As science fiction author Stephen Baxter states in his Foreword, “If SETI succeeds, first contact will probably be a moment of crucial importance...
23 April 2021
Mars rover instrument, MOXIE, extracts first oxygen from Red Planet
... landed 18 February. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact – isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the...
