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Feeding Martians

An interesting project at the South Pole, involving agriculture in a controlled (and in this case, sunless and soil-less) environment: To the moon…South Pole greenhouse model for growing freshies on other worlds

Crops of lettuce, kale, cucumber, peppers, herbs, tomatoes, cantaloupes and edible flowers comprise many of the plants grown in the climate-controlled chamber. Because […]

Settlement Infrastructure

The clouds and greenery (such as it is) distract from the impression here, but the geothermal taps at Krafla struck me as looking a lot like the infrastructure one might expect to see near a settlement on the Moon or Mars. The offworld resemblance wasn’t only in the incompletely-terraformed appearance of the landscape.

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Rover’s-Eye View

A slightly-marsified version of one of my Iceland pics, from the wastelands near Emstrur.

It was easy to see why NASA sent Apollo astronauts to train here.

More Mars on Earth

Finally getting the time to post more of my Iceland pictures on Flickr. Aside from the clouds and the sparse moss, one could picture a vista like this on Mars:

As I upload the pictures, I’m also adding any especially un-Earth-like shots to a separate set which I will publish here later. The set […]

Back Soon From Mars

I really, really should have visited Iceland before we started writing a novel set on Mars. If Texas is like a whole other country, Iceland is like a whole other not-quite-fully-terraformed planet.

Finally back in Reykjavik after a week’s trek through the hinterlands north of Eyjafjallajokull and two weeks of camping throughout the rest […]

Goodbye to Chandrayaan

Looks like India’s Chandrayaan I lunar probe has died, after a pretty good run.

India’s space agency ended an $82 million mission to map the surface of the moon after failing to restore contact with its unmanned Chandrayaan I craft.

Contact was lost with the probe two days ago and scientists at the Indian Space […]

Moonbat Bruce Goes Loony

Yeah, I know: short trip.

According to Bruce Gagnon, NASA’s upcoming LCROSS “moon bombing” is a test of first-strike space weapons.

No…seriously…he actually believes this.

When the space craft arrives near the moon it will fire a missile, at twice the speed of a bullet, from the spacecraft into the moon’s surface. NASA maintains […]

New Trove of Cassini Saturn Pictures

Eye candy. Or planet pr()n.

This, I Like

Let’s hope NASA can actually make something of this project – NASA Eyes Nuclear Reactor for Moon Base:

Supported at a cost of about $10 million a year, the Fission Surface Power Project this week awarded two contracts for power conversion units, used to turn the heat of nuclear reactions into electricity…

The converter design […]