Save America EBook Sale

I think for the past decade, every Fourth of July I’ve had a sale for some of my ebooks.  Which ones vary over the years, but Political Pies, my collection of forty short stories of a political nature, is always included.  The sale is usually just to mark the Fourth of July, but this year – with an ever-quickening slide into authoritarianism – I’m making it a Save America Sale.

How will my ebooks save America?  Well, I could argue that most of my stories are science fiction and show worlds where very alien aliens have learned to live and work together, thus showing the idiocy of people being upset their neighbor doesn’t have the exact same shade of skin color.  But really, my ebooks don’t contain some magic formula to save America.  It’s just a nice gesture.  If you’re fighting authoritarianism, then it’s likely you read, so here is a collection of free ebooks you can pick up.

In previous years, I’ve had sales at points throughout the year where I asked people to also register to vote or to vote.  But apparently, offering anything to get people to register or to vote is technically illegal.  I doubt they’d go after some unknown author giving away free ebooks, but I’m also not a billionaire who can just bribe his way out of problems.  So for this Save America Sale, I’m not asking anyone to do anything.  If you do decide to register to vote, or run for office, or march in the streets, that is entirely on you.  But if you have some time waiting for the march to get going, some of these ebooks are collections of short stories you can read in a few minutes. 

###

From Tuesday July 1st through Saturday July 5th, the following eight ebooks will be free to download.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Rise

“Rise” is a standalone story set in my Human Republic Universe. The story follows the events after the tragic deaths of the colonists on a small colony in a distant star system.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, The Only Certainty follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

Voter Registration Drive Book Sale!

The other day I saw something about the deadline to register to vote for some special elections is like, next week.  I don’t live anywhere these special elections are happening, so I haven’t paid much attention to them.  But every election is important, especially now.  If you want to vote, you need to be registered.  And who knows what new hoops will be added to the registration process in the coming years.  So if you are an American citizen over eighteen, now’s the time to register.  The information to do so should be on your state’s website, but you can also check out Vote411.  And if you’re already registered, these sites should also let you check your voter status, because while voter lists need to be updated as people move or die, some go overboard.  Any “mistake” found now can be fixed long before the next election, making the election run smoother.

To draw a bit of attention to this, and to give some slight encouragement to register, I’m running a book sale from Monday February 24th, through Friday February 28th.  For that week, four of my ebooks will be free to download on Kindle.  I think it is against the law for someone to offer you something to register to vote, but it’s not like I’m offering you a million dollars to vote.  And it’s only four ebooks from an unknown author just to register.  If I was rich and famous, I’d be doing other things to pull democracy from the jaws of authoritarianism. 

If you’re not an American, you can still grab my ebooks.  I just ask you to participate in your government however you can.  Since America is no longer the leader of the free world, someone else will need to step up.

***

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Useless Cogs

Useless Cogs is a collection of forty, of my science fiction stories. They range from only a few dozen words to a few thousand and are filled with time travelers, AIs, clones, aliens, even sexbots, although not often as you would imagine. As example, there’s a time traveler that’s always a step behind, an AI that’s late on rent, and a sexbot with bad software. Some of the stories are humorous, some horrifying, and some … depend on your point of view.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, “The Only Certainty” follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be. 

Thoughts on Starship

I typed this up and scheduled it to post just before Starship’s second test flight.

My thoughts on Starship?  Meh.

I was extremely excited in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to put a payload into orbit on their Falcon 1 rocket.  As a big space supporter, I saw this as the first step on the road to the space future I’d been dreaming about.  I figured it was just a matter of maybe a decade or so before we’d see private rockets launching private astronauts to private space stations.  I was super excited for the future.

I was a bit bummed when the Falcon 1 was retired, but the Falcon 9 would be a better rocket to launch people on.  And the first fights were of the cargo Dragon capsules which would lead the way to crewed Dragons.  So I was still super excited.

Now, I know that the space business isn’t known for speed.  That it takes years to design, and build, and test craft long before they even launch.  But even knowing that, there were some unnerving things with SpaceX.  At some point, I read that they had contracts to launch 60 satellites in the next five years, which works out to a launch a month.  At the time, that was a pretty tough launch cadence.  But at the time, they had launched only five or six times in a year.  And sometime in this “They need to speed things up” thinking, they started making changes to the booster and the fueling.  Which is great, but for awhile it seemed about every mission was delayed because they had issues with the densified fuel.  As an armchair rocket person, I wondered why they didn’t just build five or six of the boosters they knew worked to keep launching satellites to get through their backlog, and to give them some time to work on their new boosters on the side.  And I’m sure there are a hundred reasons not to have done it that way, but from the outside looking in it seemed like a missed opportunity to keep the launch cadence up while still experimenting.

Still, these experiments lead to boosters being recovered and launched again, and again.  Reusable rockets are fantastic.  They are a clear necessity to the space future I want.  And yes, now it’s a slow week if only one Falcon 9 launches, but most of the flights are for Starlink.  Don’t get me wrong, space internet is a great idea, but far from the private space stations and moon bases and stuff I’ve been waiting for for … over a decade now. 

And yes, the cargo Dragon got upgraded to a Crew Dragon, and they are flying astronauts to the ISS and to orbit, but I read they stopped building Crew Dragons.  Which I don’t understand.  There are people who will pay to orbit the Earth, and I’m sure there are friendly nations who would love to have missions with their astronauts, and someday there will be private space stations needing craft to carry crew to.  And again, as someone from the outside looking in, it’s like, “You have something that’s working, why aren’t you continuing with it?”

To step back a bit, there’s the Falcon Heavy.  Which, when it was announced, I was thrilled by.  I’m a Return to the Moon person, and surely the Falcon Heavy could land rovers or cargo to start building up a moon base.  But then, it will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  It will launch next year.  And it finally launched, but then we only had like four launches in five years.  Now, I understand it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse of why build a satellite needing this much lift if a rocket capable of that lift isn’t flying yet.  But we’re coming up on six years since Elon’s car was launched.  And yes, we’ve had four flights this year, with one more scheduled.  But it almost feels like they spent all this time to build this big rocket, and then found it hard to find things to launch with it.  Which seems like a bit of a misstep. 

And now to Starship.  After years of waiting for the Falcon Heavy, I knew not to get too excited for this even bigger, more complex rocket.  And after all this time, I don’t really care.  Like, either it will be like the Falcon Heavy and start to hit its stride four or five years from now, in which case I might be more excited, or it will hit its stride in a year or two by launching Starlinks.  What would get me excited is if they announced a plan to launch Starship with an expendable upper stage so they could put this Skylab type space station up.  That I would like.  But nothing else about Starship seems that exciting.  Yes, there’s the Human Landing System for Artemis 3 and 4, but what happens beyond that?  Will it just be for those missions, or will there be more to build up a private moon base?  You’d think, if they had the systems to land people on the moon, why not continue to do that?  But I’ll point out, they apparently stopped building Crew Dragons.

What is the future of Starship, and of SpaceX?  They’ve pretty much stopped talking about Mars, which I always found annoying.  (I mean, I am the author of The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.) But is their future just … Starlink?  It’s tough to get excited for this big rocket if I don’t really care what it will be used for.  It’s like, even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I don’t really care for the SLS.  Because I want a continual, sustained presence on the moon, and a billion-dollar rocket that launches once a year, maybe, isn’t how you do that.  And I don’t know if Starship will do that.  Honestly, at this point I’m more excited for New Glenn, only because, while I don’t know what they’ll do with it, it doesn’t have as much baggage as Starship or SLS. 

I think all of this comes down to me being tired of waiting.  I think there are to be fourteen missions that will go to or flyby the moon in 2024.  Seven of these will launch on Falcon 9s, two on Falcon Heavies, and one on Starship.  And even though I’m a Return to the Moon person, I’m not overly excited.  Probably because for decades I’ve heard plans on moon bases, but all have fallen through.  When the next humans land on the moon, I will be happy, but there will a bit of dread in the back of my mind that it will be another Apollo Program where we stop going after a couple of missions.  I don’t think I’ll feel like the future is finally here until there is a permanently crewed Lunar base.  Will Starship play a role in that?  Who knows.

A big week for lunar exploration

If all goes as planned – and it’s space flight so that’s a big IF – next week will be a big week for lunar exploration.  First off, on Monday we’ll see the landing of Luna 25.  Luna 25 is the first Russian lunar mission since Luna 24 in 1976, back when it was still the Soviet Union.  Then on Wednesday, India’s Vikram lander will land, which is part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.  If successful, India will become only the fourth entity to land something on the moon, after the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in February 1966, the US’s Surveyor 1 in June 1966, and China’s Chang’e 3 in December 2013.  And we hopefully won’t have to wait another decade for the fifth entity, because on Friday/Saturday Japan will launch the SLIM mission, which will land in a couple of weeks or months (I couldn’t quickly find any info on how soon it would land.) So in six days we could have two landings and the launch of another lander.  And there’s like a dozen more lunar missions scheduled to launch by the end of 2024.  I wish all the teams luck.

What will we have accomplished in space by 2033?

There are a lot of things I’m waiting for in the long quest to turn humanity into a spacefaring civilization.  I made a list over four years ago of four things I’m waiting for, and so far we’ve accomplished one.  One is a few years away from being done, one is more than a decade away, and the other, who knows if it will be accomplished.  But I was thinking about all of this the other day, and I wondered what will we likely accomplish in the next decade.  This is what I came up with.

Suborbital tourist flights will probably be finished.

For years, the idea of suborbital tourist flights excited me and I truly thought that – even though the common folk could never afford them – they would excite the public about space.  But it took so long for these companies to get flying, that I figure the industry is DOA.  People will still fly, but instead of the expected hundreds of people a year, it will probably only be dozens.  And the next accident – especially if passengers die – will ground the entire industry.  There will still be suborbital flights for experiments, and maybe once a blue moon they’ll brave the paperwork to have a technician along with the experiments, but I expect by 2033 suborbital tourism will be in the history books.

Private space stations.

One factor against suborbital tourism will be orbital tourism.  Yes, orbital tourism will be 1,000X as expensive as suborbital tourism, but you’ll get a 10,000X greater experience.  And the best place to go for orbital tourism will be a private space station.  Now, the ISS is great, but it’s not a hotel.  It’s a stinky laboratory filled with people doing various experiments.  To really get your space tourism money’s worth, you’d want a purpose-built hotel with large windows to view the Earth and space, and sound-proof cabins to join the 200-mile-high club.

But private space stations won’t just be hotels.  Some could be other laboratories, or even new businesses.  I can easily imagine robotic tugs bringing broken satellites to a space station where astronauts fix and upgrade them before returning them to service. 

Landing on the moon.

The biggest thing that will likely happen in the next decade will be humans returning to the moon.  By 2033 there may only be two or three landings, but they might be from two different programs, which will be fantastic.  And hopefully these won’t just be flags and footprints missions, but ones that start building a permanent presence on the moon. 

Mars?

Unlike what seems to be a majority of space people, I’m not that interested in human exploration of Mars.  Yes, we’ll do it someday, but unlikely in my lifetime.  The main reason, is that I’ve long maintained that while we are 100X better prepared to go to the moon now than we were in the 1960’s, going to Mars is 200X more complicated than going to the moon.  Any rush to get a crewed mission to Mars in the next decade will, in my humble opinion, be doomed to fail.  In fact, a successful, crewed mission to Mars by 2043 is probably overly optimistic.

***

So, those are my thoughts.  Do you agree or disagree with them?

Moon landing sale!

If everything goes as planned, then on Tuesday, April 25th, ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 will land on the moon.  If successful, ispace will become only the fourth entity to successfully land a craft on the moon.  They will follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in February 1966, the US’s Surveyor 1 in June 1966, and China’s Chang’e 3 in December 2013.  The big difference between this lander and previous ones, is that it will be a private company doing it.

I am a big supporter of lunar exploration, so to mark this latest attempt, I will have a sale on two of my ebooks.  From Monday April 24th, through Friday April 28th, you will be able to grab my collection of essays The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars, and my collection of stories all set on the moon A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories for just the price of a click. 

Wishing ispace the best of luck.

An idea to explore lunar lava tubes

I’ve written before that Designing a practical lunar base is hard.  Having something easy to build while keeping astronauts safe from radiation and micrometeorites is a challenge.  One location for a base that is already safe from micrometeorites – and some radiation – would be in lunar lava tubes.  I was thinking about this one day, and I wondered how could we explore them?  They don’t seem to just open in the side of a cliff allowing us to just walk in.  The only way in seem to be these “skylights” where part of the roof has collapsed.  After some thought, I came up with this four-step plan on exploring a lunar lava tube.

Step 1

This would be a basic, solar powered rover, that would land a kilometer or so from a skylight.  It would then drive to within about twenty meters of the opening.  The last thing we want is to make the skylight bigger, so I want to be as careful as we can around these.  Attached to the rover would be a forty-meter cable with a set of lights and cameras on the end.  This would be fired into the skylight with a compressed gas canister.  The cameras would – hopefully – be able to give a view of the immediate area under the skylight.  There might even be LED “flares” that could be shot out to give a better illumination of the floor.  The main purposes of the mission would be to determine how thick the roof is, how deep it is to the floor, and if the floor is smoothish or just a jumble of rocks.

If the roof seems thick enough, and the cameras aren’t just hitting the wall, the rover could drive forward a meter or so at a time.  By taking more pictures, you could then build up a good 3D map of the area right under the skylight.

Hopefully, from the landing to the mapping could be done in less than two weeks.  That’s because as a solar powered rover, I don’t know if it would survive the lunar night.  I think some solar powered landers and rovers have, but if we don’t have to design for it to survive the night it would be cheaper. 

Step 2

This would use a bigger rover, powered by an RTG.  If the roof was thick enough, and you could pinpoint a landing, you could use just a lander, but a rover would make things easier.  It would again land a kilometer or so away, and drive to within ten or twenty meters of the edge.  It would then unroll a cable designed to reach the bottom of the lava tube, with some meters of slack.  At the end of the cable would be a base station.  This base station would use an airbag system like the Mars Pathfinder.  At the bottom of the skylight, the base station would deflate the airbags and unfold.  The communication and power would go up and down the cable, since you probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with Earth from the bottom.  And like Mars Pathfinder, this base station would have a rover, either wheeled if the bottom is smooth enough, or an insect like one if the floor is just a jumble of rocks.  The rover/walker would go out to explore, but would come back to plug back into the base station to recharge its batteries.  To do this, the base station may need a little robotic arm to reach out and plug the rover in.  

One option for this would be to have the base station with the cable land as a separate mission.  That way you’re not trying to fit it all on a rover that also has to fit on a rocket.  You could land the big RTG rover and have it spend a year or so doing various studies, and then you land the station and have the rover pick it up and take it to the skylight.

Step 3

Human exploration.  The main part of this step is an elevator.  I imagine you’d make some structure that would spread the weight out along the edge of the skylight, because you don’t want to make the skylight bigger.  This structure might even hang over the edge a few meters, depending on the walls and floor.  From the structure you could load astronauts and cargo into the elevator.  Set twenty or so meters back from the edge would be the power system to run the elevator’s winch.  I imagine you’d send two astronauts down while two remained to make sure the winch worked.  In case of an emergency, there would probably be a knotted rope type thing the astronauts could clip onto and climb out with. 

Assuming everything still works with the RTG rover from Step 2, that could be used as a communication system for the astronauts.  Or they could just bring larger, more capable rovers that could recharge off this RTG. 

Step 4

Building a base.  More missions would bring solar panels and battery packs, and maybe a small reactor.  These would be brought near the edge and the power cords lowered down.  The first outpost would be a prefab unit that would be lowered with the elevator and built.  The crew would spend most of their time down in the tube with as much work as possible on the surface down with robots. 

But to really build a colony would require better access to the tube.  This would be done either by finding an appropriate spot to tunnel out to the surface so you could just drive in, or by building a ramp at the skylight.  Both would probably require a lot of time and resources, but one future moon buggy will probably carry more people and cargo than can fit in the elevator.  And any burgeoning lunar base would have several.

***

We’re in the beginnings of a new era of lunar exploration.  Will something like this happen?  Only time will tell.

Thoughts on the Artemis Program

As a moon firster who sees returning to the moon as the first step to making humanity a spacefaring civilization, I must be thrilled with the … possibly soon launch of the SLS.  Right?  Well, I’ve always been lukewarm towards the Artemis Program.  And I think the main reason is the SLS.  Don’t get me wrong, the SLS is a fantastic, gorgeous rocket and everyone who worked on it should be proud, and I do have the primal “Big Rocket Cool” feeling.  But I think the SLS is the wrong way to get to where I want humanity to go.

They say that the SLS will send the next person to the moon, which is nice, but I don’t want just a couple of people bouncing around on the moon.  I want a permanently crewed base which grows into a colony.  Yes, being alive when people are on the moon will be great, but I’d much rather be alive when the first human is born on the moon.  And this one mission every year – maybe – doesn’t seem to be the best way to go about that.

Over the last decade or so, my view of big rockets has dimmed.  Yes, “Big Rocket Cool,” but I’ve started thinking that we could probably achieve more using the “small” rockets we have than waiting years, or decades, for the big rockets.  Like, it’s tough accurately comparing rockets with how much they can launch and at what price, but let’s say the SLS will launch 10X what a Falcon 9 can launch.  But for the price of one SLS, you could probably buy two or three Falcon 9s and launch each of them ten or fifteen times.  Even if you just launch one Falcon 9 a month, you could easily get more mass into space in the year(s) between SLS launches. 

If everything goes as planned, the next humans to land on the moon will happen in 2025 with Artemis III.  That would be fantastic.  But the next landing would be Artemis V in 2028, maybe.  And who knows how many missions there will be beyond that.  Just given the costs, I expect the SLS to fly fewer times than the Saturn V.  And you can’t have a permanently crewed base – let alone a colony – with so few flights.  What I expect is that other entities will have separate, more sustainable programs that will take far more people to the moon.  That path of lunar exploration is what excites me.  Like, these other programs will be the featured movie while the Artemis Program will be the five-minute cartoon at the beginning of it.  Still entertaining, but not the main attraction. 

A fun idea for a moon mission

Lately, I’ve been doing some thinking on what I would do if I had money to burn.  There’s a long list of things I’d do that could be done with a million dollars or so.  But I started thinking what if I had a billion to burn.  And I figured that one thing I’d do would be to privately fund a robotic lunar program.  I am a big supporter of humans returning to the moon to stay, and if I had the money what could I do to help further that goal.  This is what I came up with.

This is the ideal program, but I’m not sure if a private citizen would be able to do part of it.  I’ll get to that.  This program would consist of three types of landers (I’ll call them A, B, and C) all landing in the same area.  There’d be four or five As, as many or more Bs, and one C.  The Bs – and probably the Cs – would all be identical, but the As might have some slight design differences.  In the super ideal program, we’d just keep building these and sending new sets to do science at various locations on the lunar surface. 

So what science would be done?  The A Landers would land and scoop up a large amount of regolith.  It would then mix this with some binding agent and 3D print a … brick.  Well, three bricks.  This first set would probably be the solid bricks we’re used to, but later sets would probably contain voids to minimize the material needed.  And there could be sets with raw regolith, and another set where the regolith is ground to make the particles more uniform.  Further A Landers could have some other processing element, or would use a different binding agent.  I don’t know exactly how much mass could be landed, but each A Lander may only be able to print a dozen or so bricks.

A B Lander would land nearby and two bricks from each set would be loaded into a return capsule.  This would be launched back to Earth where scientists could study the bricks.  The reason you’d want at least two of each type is so you could do destructive testing on one of them.  Depending on how reliable the return capsule is, you might want to only put one brick from a set in each.  And depending on how much mass can be returned, you could also send plain regolith or rock samples back to Earth.

How would these bricks be loaded into the return capsule?  That’s the job of the C Landers, which would be rovers.  Ideally, these would be RTG powered, but I don’t know if a private citizen could buy an RTG, so these rovers might need to be done in a partnership with NASA.  Besides loading the bricks, these rovers could do their own research.  But the reason they need to be RTG powered is so that they can survive for long periods of time so that they check up on the bricks that are left on the moon.  These would be left out and the rover would come by once a month or so and take photos to see how they are standing up to the lunar day/night cycle.  I see the four or five A Landers all landing within ten kilometers of each other.  Once the rover works out a path between all of them, it could just drive itself.  Or, I guess it could move the remaining bricks all to one location and just come back to it after doing its other explorations.  I suppose you could even make a D lander that would just bring more binding agent the rover could take to refill the A Landers. 

The more you think about it, the more ways there are to do things.  But why do this?  Even with gigantic, reusable rockets, it will still costs a lot of money to launch stuff off Earth and land it on the moon.  A lander that prints a structure using regolith will be able to make a larger structure than would have fit on whatever rocket launched that lander.  Yes, the first lunar base will have structures built on Earth, but the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to expand that base will be with lunar bricks.  And while some have made bricks on Earth using simulated lunar regolith, nobody has built bricks on the moon to see how they stand up.  Maybe after a dozen day/night cycles the unprocessed regolith bricks start to flake, which would be good to know before we start building a base from them.

So that’s what I’d do if I had money to burn on a space project.  It’s not flashy, it’s not inspiring, but it would bring us that much closer to being a spacefaring civilization.

Moon landing sale!

I am a big supporter of returning to the moon; I think it’s our best way of becoming a spacefaring civilization.  As such, I will often spend an hour or so going over the list of future moon missions on Wikipedia.  As I write this, CAPSTONE is on its way, but there could be a dozen more missions within the next year.  I wish them all success. 

But the reason for this sale is to mark the Apollo 11 landing.  Even though it happened before I was born, I do see it as an important day.  So to mark this year’s anniversary, I’m having a sale on three of my ebooks.  Just so you don’t think I’m just having a sale to have a sale, two of them deal with the moon, and the third deals with the future. 

You’ll be able to grab the following three ebooks for free between Monday July 18th and Friday July 22nd.

 

The Moon Before Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories

Hopefully, in the not too distant future humans will return to the moon. We will build bases and colonies, make farms and factories, and live, love and learn. A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories contains five short stories that are all set upon the moon. They give the tiniest glimpse of the possibilities awaiting us there.

Thanksgiving Sale!

So it’s Thanksgiving, if you live in the US.  Which means you only have a few weeks left to spend your hard earned money on mostly useless crap.  I know things have been crazy for the last couple of years, so as an early holiday gift, here are five of my ebooks you can download for free.  And the best thing is, you can get them instantly: you don’t have to wait for them to sail across the ocean and get through a crowded port. 

You can get this all for the price of a click from Wednesday November 24th, through Sunday November 28th.  I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday season, and I hope you enjoy anything of mine you read.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The majority of the stories were previously published (most on my website) but all were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about the writing of it to give a fuller experience.

The Moon Before Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as “inspirational” as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

Brain for Rent and other stories

Brain for Rent and other stories is a collection of five of my short scifi stories to give a sampling of my writing. The collection includes: “Brain for Rent” about a ne’re-do-well failed writer with a conceptual implant who discusses his work with a young woman thinking of getting an implant herself. “The Demonstration” is about a different young woman wanting to show off her latest body modification. “Self Imprisonment” offers one solution of safe keeping the backup copy of yourself. “The Best Job Ever” is about a necessary – yet unpleasant – human/alien interaction. And the collection ends with “Why Stay?” which explains why, after years of fighting the humans, the robots just deactivate.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

What I would do if I ruled space

What I mean by ruling space is if I had control over all space activities: NASA, the China National Space Administration, SpaceX, etc. all had to do my bidding.  If it goes into space – be it a military satellite, a science mission to the outer solar system, or scientists doing experiments on a space station – I have the final say.  If I – somehow – had that power, this is what I’d do.

One of the first things I’d do would be to have a review of all rockets.  To be blunt, not all rockets are equal.  This review would weed out the not so good ones.  Any rockets that release massive death clouds of toxic fumes if they fail will be phased out.  The remaining rockets would be ranked on things like: reliability, cost, launch rate, etc.  The idea would not be to cut things down to one or two rockets.  That’s a bad idea.  I’d say more like twenty or so, with different fuels and launch capacities. 

Some nations want to have their own rockets for national pride.  And that’s great and all, but is it really best to spend billions of dollars to reinvent the rocket when – if there is some power that lets you do this – you could spend a fraction of that to launch your payloads on already existing rockets?

I might also start work on a universal rocket.  Basically, this would be a set design that could be built in four or five factories in various countries around the world close to a launch pad.  This would make it easier for customers because they’d know exactly what they need to do for their satellites.  And then they’d just have to get it to whatever launch pad works best for whatever orbit they want.

Now that I have the rockets sorted out, where will people be going?  My first idea is to have several new space stations.  These would probably be of an expandable module type, and would be larger than the current ISS, with a crew of, probably ten.  They would be specialized, one for biomedical, one for material sciences, one for little bit of everything.  My idea is these would have a “home port” which would be the primary launch site for crew and supplies.  So if you were doing research on the biomedical station, you’d launch from Florida, but if you were doing materials research, you’d launch from a Chinese spaceport. 

There would also be orbital hotels, brothels, retirement homes, etc.  I’m sure there are plenty of ideas for zero-g sports, some of which might actually be fun, so there will be stadiums.  Once we get lots of people into orbit, there’s no telling what will be needed or developed.

I’d also work on stations in lunar orbit.  These would be part of my return to the moon to stay plan, which I think would be my main space focus.  The point would be to have multiple research stations across the lunar surface studying the moon itself as well as how best to live there.  That knowledge would led to larger bases and eventually cities.  The idea from the start would be for the moon to eventually become an independent nation(s).

And what of Mars?  I support the scientific exploration of Mars, but I don’t think we are ready for a crewed Mars mission.  When we can go for a couple of years with a self-sustaining life support system on a space station, then I’ll feel more comfortable.  And when we do get to Mars, I just see research stations, not cities.  I don’t buy into the whole we need to colonize Mars thing.  (See my book The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars for more details.) 

As to robotic missions, I think we should have orbiters around every planet, dwarf planet, major satellite, and big asteroid.  If there’s a surface a rover can survive on, there should be dozens of rovers.  There should also be missions to comets, interstellar objects, interstellar space itself.  And there should be dozens of telescopes for every wavelength, from gamma rays to radio waves. 

As ruler of space, I would do everything I could to get humanity the knowledge it needs to fully become a spacefaring civilization.  I think that would be the best thing anyone could do.  What would you do if you ruled space?

Moon landing sale!

I am a big supporter of returning to the moon; I think it’s our best way of becoming a spacefaring civilization.  And even though it happened before I was born, I love Apollo 11, even thinking that July 20th should be a holiday.  So to mark this year’s anniversary, I’m having a sale on four of my ebooks.  Two of them deal with the moon, but I’m including the other two as a bonus.  So between Sunday July 18th and Thursday July 22nd, you’ll be able to get the following four ebooks for free.

The Moon Before Mars

 

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories

 

Hopefully, in the not too distant future humans will return to the moon. We will build bases and colonies, make farms and factories, and live, love and learn. A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories contains five short stories that are all set upon the moon. They give the tiniest glimpse of the possibilities awaiting us there.

Lonely Phoenix

 

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

Brain for Rent and other stories

 

Brain for Rent and other stories is a collection of five of my short scifi stories to give a sampling of my writing. The collection includes: “Brain for Rent” about a ne’re-do-well failed writer with a conceptual implant who discusses his work with a young woman thinking of getting an implant herself. “The Demonstration” is about a different young woman wanting to show off her latest body modification. “Self Imprisonment” offers one solution of safe keeping the backup copy of yourself. “The Best Job Ever” is about a necessary – yet unpleasant – human/alien interaction. And the collection ends with “Why Stay?” which explains why, after years of fighting the humans, the robots just deactivate.