Hugo Award winner Ben Bova and Les Johnson complete Bova's Outer Planets series (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto)****, a Grand Tour of the human settled solar system, with a final encounter on Pluto.Major Larry Randall has been called to Pluto to retrieve Dr. Aaron Mikelson. Mikelson, no longer human after a horrific accident, is now melded to an AI. His enhanced senses have detected an alien artifact on Pluto’s surface, and h...

The year is 2072. At the lunar farside radio observatory, an old school radio broadcast is detected, similar to those broadcast on Earth in the 1940s and early 1950s, but in an unknown language, coming from an impossible source, and originating at an equally impossible location—Proxima Centauri. While the nations of Earth debate making First Contact, they learn that the Proximans are facing an extinction-level disaster, forcing a decision: Will Earth send a ship on a multiyear trip to prov...

Gritty and scientifically accurate science fiction adventure from New York Times best-selling author Ben Bova and NASA space scientist Les Johnson.The first human mission to Mars meets with near-disaster when a meteoroid strikes the spacecraft, almost destroying it. The ship is too far from Earth to simply turn around and return home. The eight-person crew must ride their crippled ship to Mars while they desperately struggle to survive.On Earth, powerful political ...

Essays by space scientists and engineers on the coolest ways and means to get humanity to the stars along with stories by an all-star assortment of talespinners abounding with Hugo and Nebula award winners: Ben Bova, Mike Resnick, Jack McDevitt, Michael Bishop, Sarah A. Hoyt and more.Some humans may be content staying in one place, but many of us are curious about what’s beyond the next village, the next ocean, the next horizon. Are there others like us out there? How will we reach...

THE SECOND TIME AROUND—IS HARDER . . .Decades after the last footprints were left on the Moon, the U.S. was preparing to return to the Lunar surface in a new class of rockets, when the mission suddenly became much more urgent. It would have to be a rescue mission.Unbeknownst to the rest of the world China had sent its own Lunar expedition. A manned expedition. Until a distress call was received, no human outside of China even knew that the mission was manned...

Interstellar Travel: After Arrival is a comprehensive, technical look at the necessary considerations for settlement on an extra solar planet following interstellar travel, addressed by leading experts in the fields of space development. The book features the current and future plans for lunar, Mars, and asteroid settlement, and how what we learn from such future endeavors might apply to settlement at destinations around other stars. In addition, scientists who have been considering the co...

The year is 2065 and an accidental encounter in space leads to the discovery that we are not alone in the universe—and that our continued existence as a species may be in jeopardy.Chris Holt, working in his office at the Space Resources Corporation, discovers that one of the asteroids he is surveying for mining is actually not an asteroid at all but a derelict spaceship. The word gets out and soon the world's powers are competing to explore and claim for themselves the secrets that...

LOOMING DESTRUCTION FROM SPACE!It's the beginning of a new golden age of space exploration. Finally, humanity is taking the commercialization of space to the next level—mining asteroids. The new gold rush of the commercial space era has begun.Another commercial venture, an attempt to put a hotel on the Moon, is seeking the space tourism gold of the ultra wealthy. And it seems as if the dream of finally sending people to Mars is finally going to happen using a ship propelled...

NEW STORIES AND ESSAYS FROM TOP AUTHORS AND EXPERT SCIENTISTS. Explorations of how interstellar travel may affect humanity by best-selling authors and scientists.The stars will change us.STELLARIS: PEOPLE OF THE STARS is a collection of original science fiction stories and nonfiction essays speculating about humanity’s far-term expansion into the universe beyond the limits of our solar system—with an emphasis on the change...

Interstellar Travel: Propulsion, Life Support, Communications, and the Long Journey addresses the technical challenges that must be overcome to make such journeys possible. Leading experts in the fields of space propulsion, power, communication, navigation, crew selection, safety and health provide detailed information about state-of-the-art technologies and approaches for each challenge, along with possible methods based on real science and engineering. This book offers in-depth, up-to-da...

HUMANITY’S HOPE FOR A BETTER FUTURE AT A NEW STARA bold journey into a future where humanity and its children travel to a new star where they must overcome the unexpected challenges on the exoplanets that await them—or die trying.Traveling to the stars will be difficult, but not, perhaps, the most difficult part. What about when we get to another star? What then? Will the planets be immediately habitable? Not likely. Will those who undertoo...

Interstellar Travel: Purpose and Motivations is a comprehensive, technical look at the necessary considerations for interstellar travel addressed by leading experts in the field, from scientists studying possible destinations (exoplanets) and the vast distances between, to those concerned with building institutions and capabilities in society that could sustain such endeavors. In addition to the technical, medical, and anthropological aspects of deep space travel, the ethics and morality o...