Mars For The Rest of Us

The first archaeological sign of complex human civilization is a 11,500 year old temple complex at Göbekli Tepe, in modern-day Turkey.

In March of 2026, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a new mission to Mars, a $2.1 billion nuclear electric rocket called SR-1 Freedom.

If you’ve ever spent time with an 11-year-old during their dinosaur phase, you know the feeling of having everything you thought you knew upturned by a pitiless pedant.

It may be that we shall find a simple general rule to apply: that microbial life exists in all the locations where microbes can survive, that would mean all the locations that have a chemical energy supply and that are at a temperature below the maximum o…

Radiation is the ultimate limiting factor in human space flight.

My purpose, and my belief, is that the bombs that killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man.

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NASA’s first brush with malnutrition came during the Apollo 15 mission in 1973.

In the early years of the International Space Station, water needed to keep the crew alive had to be delivered by Space Shuttle at a cost several times its weight in gold.

Last month I wrote about the demise of Mars Sample Return, NASA’s most ambitious planetary science mission.

Last Friday, SpaceX tested the third version of its Starship rocket.

In discussions of contamination risk on Mars, it’s sometimes taken as a given that any microbes we accidentally introduced into a Martian ecosystem would be easy to distinguish from any relic life that existed there.

The Italian space agency’s official technical report on designing the ISSpresso barely masks their astronauts’ horror at the conditions they found when they first drifted aboard the International Space Station.

Say you want to study a bunch of alien rocks.

One reason an expedition to Mars is forever two decades away is because of the leap in difficulty between landing to the Moon and going to Mars.

The traditional astronaut’s ‘low residue’ breakfast of steak and eggs pays tribute to the oldest and wisest strategy for going to the bathroom in space, which is to do everything possible to avoid it.

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How a warm puddle of goo went on to invent the citric acid cycle and then TikTok is the question of abiogenesis.

Imagine that one morning I hit you with a stick, then a golf club, and then a baseball bat.

This post is a chronology of Musk’s public timelines for landing on Mars, with some major SpaceX milestones interspersed for context.

There comes a point in reading about the health challenges of microgravity where you throw your hands up and cry, “just spin the spacecraft!”

Over sixty years of space flight we’ve learned a lot about how bodies respond to life in freefall.