"Tracy Waite’s birthday party had been cool, even if the only other kids here in Coopertown were either too little to play with or old enough they considered her one of the babies. But Dr. Malken, the astronomer, had taken her up to the observatory on the settlement’s top level and helped her locate the Earth-Moon system in the evening sky."
Tell Me A Story. Leigh Kimmel
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"He shivered at the memory of surface drilling on Vesta and Phobos. Crap pay, crap prospects, and even if you were one of the lucky ones who didn’t fire a hammer drill through your foot and end up sucking vacuum, the raddies would get you in the end."
Fisher’s Gambit. Stephen Gaskell
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"Billy gazed around at the module’s interior, the wounds
Ryder had left in the panelling. It was already an empty shell as the European Community had sold most of its interior off to the Chinese. Billy still resented the way the Chinese astronauts had come over from their Station of the Heavenly People, dismantled millions of dollars worth of customised equipment, and shipped it out with depressing efficiency. The Chinese captain, Xan Zu, had been apologetic, but stuck firmly to his list of bargains as Billy watched the guts being torn out of his Command."
Final Orbit. Nigel Brown
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"It's Launch Day. In just a few hours I’ll find out if my scientific career is about to move into high gear, or if my future will end up in pieces on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."
Launch Day. David L Clements
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"No parent ever wants to lose a child, especially not the same
child twice."
Incarnate. Craig Pay
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““We want to dance when we go out the airlock,” the Belgian said. “Pardon?” Vasilev, commander of the first manned mission to Mars, said.”
Dancing on the Red Planet. Berit Ellingsen
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"In some ways, Mars is like a celebrity that one finally meets and discovers is shorter and less attractive in person than on screen."
Making Mars a Nicer Place, in Fiction... and Fact. Eric Choi
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"The meeting had gone badly. The crew had split three ways over the crisis. "
Pathfinders. Martin McGrath
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"He pointed to the nearest window. The brown land outside, utterly barren, bitter, freezing, not Earth… that land stood unresponsive, alien, its majesty and its beauty a combination of strangeness and unattainable wealth. And David James found himself considering that Martian wealth, then realising that the mission had been seduced by it."
A Biosphere Ends. Stephen Palmer
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"The hair stood up on my arms. I’ve always been a bit suspicious, maybe even slightly paranoid. I mean, when you’ve been sleeping with your friend’s wife it’s kind of, well, obvious. Isn’t it?"
Slipping Sideways. Carmelo Rafala
#
"Vasquez watched as the astronaut fastened the package to the asteroid’s surface with a spike and shook out its contents. “What the hell are they doing?” she breathed. A great mass of flimsy green plastic unfolded itself on a flexible frame across the crater to form a banner thirty metres across. Even from a kilometre away, Vasquez could read its large clear message:
CONQUISTADORS GO HOME."
Conquistadors. Iain Cairns
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" The different teams have customised their parts of the openplan space. The level designers have surrounded themselves with a New York skyline built out of Coco Pops packets. A batterypowered Elmo played King Kong among the skyscrapers. 3D Modelling has made a huge Millennium Falcon out of drinks cans (mostly Irn-Bru, pinpointing the studio’s location in Silicon Glen rather than Silicon Valley), and hung it from the ceiling. The animators’ zone for filming reference video was filled with the brightly-coloured balls you get in children’s play areas. There was only one unusual element. “Someone’s painted huge letters, all along one wall,” Frankie tells Olivia. “In Spock blue. It says, ‘YES! WE WOULD GO’.”
Going, Boldly. Helen Jackson
#
"Throughout the history of spaceflight, every aspect turns out to be a bit harder than it would appears at first blush. Rocket fuel, launches, weather, lightning, radiation, landings, robotics, automation or lack thereof, redundancy, edible food, mission control, psychology, communications… the list goes on and on. Consider the humble spacesuit."
The Complexity of the Humble Spacesuit. Karen Burnham
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"Barney stared blankly at the sizzling steaks in front of him, temporarily at a loss for words. This was the culmination of all his dreams, the single goal that had driven him since he had been a young boy: to become an astronaut! “Thank you, sir. Thanks more than I can say. It’s, it’s something that I—”
“Just don’t screw the pooch, Barnaby."
Why Barnaby Isn’t Aboard The ISS Today. Gary Cuba
#
"The New York Times, 23 February 1969
MOSCOW (AP)—TASS announced at 2:45 am Moscow time that the Soviet Union had launched a lunar mission shortly before midnight from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The first moon landing is expected sometime on February 25, after a four-day flight."
Not Because They Are Easy. Sam S Kepfield
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" The lighters look more like buildings than flying machines. In Titania’s airless night they’ve no need of wings or streamlining, or elegance, they’re just black boxes with a hypergolic firecracker buttressed to each corner, the brute application of Newton’s second law. Xilou’s suit HUD displays infrared,
ultraviolet and photo-multiplied optical in false colours, overlaying the dim scene with a garish colour-scheme like corrupted video."
The Taking of IOSA 2083. CJ Paget
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"It still sounds wonderful, sixty years later. Whose heart wouldn’t be filled with awe at floating alone in space? Looking at all those stars in the velvety black. Who wouldn’t want to do that for the year and a half it takes to travel from Mars to Saturn? There’s only one small problem. If you did ‘space float’, as the protagonists in Asimov’s The Martian Way had, you would arrive vomiting, your hair falling out, and in serious medical danger from radiation sickness.”
A Ray of Sunshine. Bill Patterson
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"He became convinced that a pathogen, Salmonella or E coli, had hitched a ride and then exploded in a surge of near gravity-free virulence. As it turned out, something else had stowed away aboard the Vision. In hindsight, something extraordinary."
The Brave Little Cockroach Goes to Mars. Simon McCaffery
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"Alicia was the first child to be born in Lunar. In a population of five hundred colonists, there were only fifty children. It was a lower birth-rate than we’d projected. It seemed as if many of the colonists had waited to see how Alicia turned out before they had their own children. Once she passed her seventh birthday and it became clear that she was as healthy as an ox, the birth-rate
began to rise. But that meant that Alicia had very few dating opportunities."
Sea of Maternity. Deborah Walker
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"After the announcement that Fourier Rocketry had bought the ISS, the press went on a feeding frenzy, trying to figure out who these upstarts were.."
The New Tenant. Dr Philip Edward Kaldon
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"Waverider could be used for prolonged exploration of the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere, so far sampled only by vertical sounding rockets; but it could map the ionosphere of Jupiter, which is multi-layered and deep, whereas the Galileo entry probe went through it in seconds."
Waverider Entry Spacecraft: A History. Duncan Lunan
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"There were three of them. NKVD. They had done this many times before. And they set to work, going through drawers, shelves, alcoves, while Sergei and Ksenia sat on the sofa, holding hands, listening to the needle on the gramophone stuck in the run-out groove of the record. Books removed from shelves, waste paper baskets emptied, clothes examined. Sergei looked ahead, trying to distract himself with the pattern of a tree on the rug in front of him, imagining rocket flight paths in the curlicues of the leaves."
Dreaming at Baikonur. Sean Martin