#Mars
4 posts
Starship and the Architecture of a Multi-Planetary Civilization
SpaceX's Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — and if it works as designed, it is fully and rapidly reusable, capable of carrying 100+ tonnes to orbit per flight. The question now is whether it can achieve the cadence and cost to make interplanetary civilization feasible.
The Perseverance Rover: Drilling Into Mars for Signs of Ancient Life
NASA's Perseverance rover has been operating on Mars since February 2021, crawling through Jezero Crater — an ancient lake delta — drilling rock samples that may contain fossilized microbial life for a future return mission to Earth.
Panspermia and the Possibility That Life Hitchhikes Between Worlds
Life on Earth could be a descendant of life from Mars. Or life on Mars, if we find it, could be a descendant of ours. The idea that biology can travel between planets — shielded inside rocks blasted off by asteroid impacts — is not science fiction. It is a serious scientific hypothesis with growing experimental support.
Terraforming Mars: What It Would Actually Take and How Long
Transforming the cold, thin, radiation-soaked Martian surface into something resembling a living world is one of civilization's grandest proposed engineering projects. The honest answer about feasibility is both more promising and more sobering than the headlines suggest.