Free Republic

It’s a little early for Christmas shopping, but I’ve found the perfect gift for any bright child or grandchild who has the slightest stirring of curiosity about the stars and space. It’s “Space And Astronomy: Decade by Decade” by Marianne J. Dyson (Facts On File, 284 pages, $49.50). Marianne Dyson was a NASA flight controller before she started writing prize-winning books about science for young readers. Her book, “Space Station Science,” won the Golden Kite Award; “Home On The Moon” won the American Institute of Physics Writing Award. She’s also a popular lecturer and technical editor and science consultant for...

W. C. Fields is supposed to have said, “A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.” Which brings us to Sam Gunn. Sam is a character I’ve known since 1983, when I first wrote a short story about him. He was an astronaut on the moon then, and he saved the lives (or at least the sanity) of his stranded crewmates by brewing booze out of rocket fuel while they were waiting for weeks to be rescued. Sam is a space entrepreneur, a pioneer in developing profit-making businesses in space. He is a fast-talking, hyperactive, womanizing little guy...

As Yogi Berra said, "It's déjà vu all over again." The president has put into action a program to place Americans on the moon within the next decade or so. NASA is gearing up to that job, and then (if all goes well) to send human explorers to Mars. And many of the nation's leading space scientists are howling bloody murder. This is nothing new. When President John Kennedy started the Apollo program, almost every segment of the nation strongly favored the idea of landing Americans on the moon. Except for much of the scientific community.

Multiple award-winning SF author and editor Ben Bova told SCI FI Wire that his new novel, Titan (a SCI FI Essential Book), is the most complex novel he's written since his 1978 novel Colony. "[Titan] has four intertwined storylines, all dealing with the 10,000 inhabitants of the space habitat Goddard, [which is] in orbit around the planet Saturn," Bova said in an interview. "Scientists aboard the habitat want to study Saturn's giant moon, Titan, and the planet's mysterious rings of ice. Ruthless politicians want to control the population for their own benefit." Titan is the most recent entry in Bova's...