Tuesday 29 December 2015

still more from the pages of Reach for Mars:

“Hmmm!” said Nick.
I looked from Mel to Sammy and back again as I spoke.
“Honestly, it’s staring-you-in-the-face obvious why Nick was chosen to be the captain, commander, and grand poobah of this mission, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t we fly Albatross over to the crater tomorrow morning and use her thrusters to clear the sand away from the hull of the wreck,” Nick finally said.
I looked back at Nick as I considered his proposal. “Huh? You know what? I believe that might work. But wouldn’t it be a better idea to use the bow thrusters to do the clearing so we can see what we’re doing?”
“It might be!” Nick retorted.

Wednesday 23 December 2015

Yet more from the pages of Reach for Mars:

“Actually, that does raise a rather difficult problem. How are we going to explore that shipwreck when it is buried under all that sand and dust? It’s far too big an area to dig out with shovels; even the excavator wouldn’t be able to handle it in a useful time frame.”
“Calling it a shipwreck when it lies in the middle of a desert on a planet that has no readily available water is, to say the least, extremely incongruous!” Mel interrupted.
I glanced over at her. “It’s a spaceship, and it’s wrecked,” I replied.
Then I looked back at Nick in anticipation of his answer to my question,

Tuesday 22 December 2015

Some more from the pages of Reach for Mars:

As humanity progressed, a new breed of humans evolved: men and women who dreamed of flying to the stars and wrote stories about their dreams, which we call science fiction—Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and the list goes on.
Their stories have enthralled and inspired generations of young children and teenagers to dream of flying to the stars themselves. Some grew up to follow that dream and became scientists specializing in astrophysics and rocket propulsion technology to try to make that dream come true.
The writers posed the question, “What if we could?”

The scientists developed the technology, So we could!

Monday 21 December 2015

More from the pages of Reach for Mars:

They saw groups of stars that they thought made shapes and gave them names. They  saw planets among the stars and gave them names. They used them to explain previously unexplainable events on planet Earth. They used them to navigate their way around our planet, and they even used them to predict our future (for better or worse). They invented telescopes so they could look at them more closely, which they made larger and larger so they could look at them even more closely. Today they fire telescopes into space so they can look at them really closely.

Sunday 20 December 2015

From the pages of Reach for Mars:

Ever since humans dropped out of the trees and started walking around on two legs, they have always looked up at night and gazed at the stars in wonder. Sitting at their fires outside their caves, as large creatures blundered around them in the dark, or eons later sitting at their campfires after riding the range all day herding and driving large creatures, who blundered around him in the dark, they would look up and gaze at the stars in wonder.