This article kept me glued to my screen. Really cool! Thanks.

This happened to me, until I realized that two of my characters had a really interesting interaction. So, instead of making my plot be basically a travelogue of my world, I made it about them!

I'm guessing you must hate Star Trek, Charlie! It ticks several of those boxes. ;)

You win three thousand Internets.

The problem Big Dog would likely have on Mars is that there are a lot of joints for dust to get into. But! With enough R&D, we could probably develop some good enough sealing systems to have a mission that lasts for a year or so. You're right that the rough-terrain mobility would be really useful.

I just started these, and while I could do without the horror-influenced crud, they are pretty fantastic space stories! Really interested to see where it goes as I start in on book two...

No, he said they're stupid!

Can I just say I love the serious engineer in a suit standing chest-deep in the water?

Considering that we only discovered the Van Allen belts with the launch of Explorer 1, I'd say that your guess is right. ;)

Same here. We even had people obviously anticipating it. ("Wait for it...aaaaaaaaaand....") I actually thought the radiation scene worked pretty well, personally - but they should have left the yell out.

Silly, but: it was Kirk trying to TRICK Khan. So it was William Shatner acting like Captain Kirk acting like yelling "Khaaaaaaaan!"

Ah, I misunderstood you. I thought you were trying to imply that a mission to Mars was a guaranteed death trap for the crew, because the technological challenges are too great to surmount. I think, instead, you're actually talking about making the missions intentionally one-way, such that the astronauts will live out…

The headline is sensational and misleading. It's not that everything we know about planet formation is wrong - it's that aspects of our theories need revising.

It's possible to solve similar problems all at once, though, especially when we have ambitious goals - as you pointed out in reference to the Apollo program.

First of all, I think it's definitely not true to say that death on Mars is a "certainty." It's a risk, and it's a hard problem to solve, but that doesn't mean that it's insoluble, that the risks aren't addressable, or that the risks aren't worth it. We shouldn't shy away from the problem because it's hard and complex.

Don't worry, you can have your tea in zero-g, too:

By the way, here is a CubeSat that DOES shoot a laser for you: http://nasa.olin.edu/projects/2011/…

They absolutely do do those things. What's cool about CubeSats is that they're cheap and small, which means it's vastly easier to launch one than a regular satellite, which means that higher-risk technologies tend to make their way onto CubeSats more often than onto big spacecraft.

At 400 km altitude, air drag is pretty significant on such low-mass satellites. Their lifetimes are typically only a couple months before their orbits decay and they burn up in the atmosphere.