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Halfway to Mars, a ship's doctor treats a kidney stone with a urologist on Earth answering nine minutes late. On the Martian surface, salt in the ice is choking the plant that makes the crew's fuel for the trip home, and a global dust storm leaves a base living on its batteries for eleven days. Further out there's a lander that keeps pushing itself off Ceres, a navigator taking a spacecraft low over a lumpy metal asteroid, and a Europa lander that fails its last sterility test weeks before launch.
It's hard science fiction with no miracle tech, so the drama comes from the gap between what a mission was built for and what it actually meets. The later stories stretch across whole careers: a Uranus orbiter that arrives after the people who built it have retired, a timing error found nineteen days before the only pass of Triton, and a probe bound for four hundred times Earth's distance from the Sun, which the scientist who leads it knows he won't live to see get there.
What you get: a ZIP file containing the book as a PDF (164 pages) and an EPUB, so you can read it on a computer, tablet or e-reader.
Halfway to Mars, a ship's doctor treats a kidney stone with a urologist on Earth answering nine minutes late. On the Martian surface, salt in the ice is choking the plant that makes the crew's fuel for the trip home, and a global dust storm leaves a base living on its batteries for eleven days. Further out there's a lander that keeps pushing itself off Ceres, a navigator taking a spacecraft low over a lumpy metal asteroid, and a Europa lander that fails its last sterility test weeks before launch.
It's hard science fiction with no miracle tech, so the drama comes from the gap between what a mission was built for and what it actually meets. The later stories stretch across whole careers: a Uranus orbiter that arrives after the people who built it have retired, a timing error found nineteen days before the only pass of Triton, and a probe bound for four hundred times Earth's distance from the Sun, which the scientist who leads it knows he won't live to see get there.
What you get: a ZIP file containing the book as a PDF (164 pages) and an EPUB, so you can read it on a computer, tablet or e-reader.