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These are hard science fiction stories, so there's no warp drive and no aliens, just real engineering pushed a little further than we've taken it so far. A flight software engineer has to defend the rule that switched her solar probe's instruments off at the worst possible moment. A thermal engineer on Mercury can't keep his lander's arm warm without warming the ice it came to sample. The last commander of the International Space Station has room for a couple of hundred kilograms on the way home, and nearly two tonnes of other people's life's work to choose from.
The book works outward from the Sun, past Venus and Earth orbit to the Moon and the near-Earth asteroids, and every story turns on a margin of some kind: heat, propellant, radiation, time, money, nerve. Nobody's a superhero. The crises are a radiation reading nobody can quite trust, a ten-second signal delay, a freezer alarm that might be lying, and the people dealing with them are tired, careful and well aware they'll have to explain themselves afterwards.
What you get: a ZIP file containing the book as a PDF (155 pages) and an EPUB, so you can read it on a computer, tablet or e-reader.
These are hard science fiction stories, so there's no warp drive and no aliens, just real engineering pushed a little further than we've taken it so far. A flight software engineer has to defend the rule that switched her solar probe's instruments off at the worst possible moment. A thermal engineer on Mercury can't keep his lander's arm warm without warming the ice it came to sample. The last commander of the International Space Station has room for a couple of hundred kilograms on the way home, and nearly two tonnes of other people's life's work to choose from.
The book works outward from the Sun, past Venus and Earth orbit to the Moon and the near-Earth asteroids, and every story turns on a margin of some kind: heat, propellant, radiation, time, money, nerve. Nobody's a superhero. The crises are a radiation reading nobody can quite trust, a ten-second signal delay, a freezer alarm that might be lying, and the people dealing with them are tired, careful and well aware they'll have to explain themselves afterwards.
What you get: a ZIP file containing the book as a PDF (155 pages) and an EPUB, so you can read it on a computer, tablet or e-reader.