KSK

Yes - I'd agree with your triple whammy idea, not least because Mishin, whilst a solid deputy, just wasn't any sort of replacement for Korolev (although to be fair - who was) and certainly didn't have Korolev's political savvy. Or so I recall from reading Part II of Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo but I can't back that up through having read any other sources. Continuing that line of thought, rather than your trio of von Braun, Shepard and Glenn, I would propose von Braun, Glenn and Webb. I suspect that Apollo already had sufficient inertia even as Gemini was in progress, that losing those three wouldn't have caused the program to implode quite as badly as the Soviet Moon program. Whether we'd have seen the first lunar landing by the end of the decade is another matter and I'm thinking that without Webb fighting NASA's corner up on the Hill, that Apollo would have been living on (even more) borrowed time after the first landing. I'm just throwing that out there as a debating point - feel free to refute!

Duly noted, especially Korolev. He always struck me as a far more sympathetic figure than Von Braun - I'd be curious to see if I still hold that view after reading the book.

Will do - cheers!

Ooh - thank you @MaxwellsDemon. I might take a copy of that list if you don't mind? As a personal reference and a quick and easy source of Christmas present ideas if anyone in my family need them. Props for the avatar too - if that's the Lego kit I think it is (space cruiser and Moon base set, spaceship has a buggy in the back?) then it's one I always wanted as a kid!

I thought we already had. But just in case that's all some wild conspiracy theory... yeah, NASA should get some more probes out to Ceres, asap.

Thanks @Plecy75! Not a problem - real life always takes priority. Besides, the next chapter is written and into editing, so there'll likely be more content reasonably Soontm. And, apropo First Flight, although not remotely connected to the next chapter, I was listening to an interesting podcast about Ceres the other day. If anyone's interested, the 'cast is Spacepod - mostly featuring lots of short interviews with various astronomers and planetary scientists. They're intended for a general audience so they're very much at the pop-sci level of detail but that suits me just fine! Anyhow, it turns out that Ceres has deposits of some weird (I quote) minerals that are basically clays formed in an ammonia environment rather than an aqueous one. Which implies that Ceres has quantities of ammonia ice beneath the crust (I may be getting some details wrong here) and ammonia ices are only stable on a long enough timescale in the outer solar system. So a current theory is that that's where Ceres started out and was kicked in-system by something. It also turns out that Ceres is blotchy - every so often there's an outpouring of ammonia/water brines from the interior, which sublimate on the surface leaving lighter coloured deposits of ammonium salts and the aforementioned weird minerals on the surface. It's nice when your fictional planetary science turns out to be not too far out in the scientific weeds. Although the podcast made no mention of cryovolcanoes or daring crewed landings. Edit: If anyone is really curious, here's a Nature abstract on telescope (ground and orbiting) based observations of Ceres, talking about the minerals and their origins. And here's a nice JPL summary of two papers written by the Dawn team, which talks about the bright patches.

Careful - it depends if @CatastrophicFailure is planning to go all Andromeda Strain on us... We've seen that those poor tortured souls can be laid to rest with a well-aimed shot. But what is this contagion? Is it biological - some twisted vector of insanity? Or is it far, far worse? If the glorps are being animated by something, then consider this. The nuke might well release that something whilst also giving it the fire of a thousand suns to feed on. Not to mention the irradiated-out-of-existence souls of everything caught in the blast. And that may not be prudent.

Yes. Yes it was. Totally see why you broke it down into two chapters though - it would have been a real brute otherwise. Plus having that 'click...click...click' motif appear in consecutive (and very different) chapters worked really well.

I have no intention of sitting through a 20 minute video, so I may be wildly off-base here - but this sounds unlikely. It takes a handful of minutes to burn a piece of coal but several million years to make it. Greening the deserts might be helpful for locking away carbon but I doubt it'll lock it away fast enough to reverse climate change any time soon.

How about: For some Moon art by a Moonwalker.

Whilst political whims are almost as reliable as UK weather, the Moon is currently in favour, so I'm going with the Deep Space Gateway being completed reasonably early in that 2030-2100 timeframe, possibly followed by one or more state sponsored lunar landings, depending how China's lunar program goes. Throw in some free-return tourist flights around the Moon, and that's my pessimistic prediction, which assumes that LFR, New Glenn and the rest either fail to materialise or fail to deliver as hoped. Assuming that LFR etc do fly and fly reasonably economically, I think crewed spaceflight is still going to depend quite heavily on state sponsored programs in the short to medium term. In a rational world the state programs would be leveraging all that lovely cheap(ish) lift capacity developed by the private sector. However, we do not live in a rational world and getting national space agencies (and governments) to a) realign their roles in spaceflight and b) eat the required quantities of humble pie, is going to be challenging. I think the political hurdles to continued crewed spaceflight are are going to be far more problematic than the technical or probably even the economic hurdles But lets set that aside and go for some optimism! I'm going for a lunar outpost, flags and footprints on Mars, possibly a small and growing outpost that's inhabited beyond the timeline of those flags and footprints missions, and at least two privately owned stations in LEO (probably servicing a growing space tourism industry), plus ISS2. Also, a heavy focus on asteroid missions and mining. If Bezos is serious about his 'millions of people in space' plans then I think resource gathering is going to form a substantial part of those plans, and I think that means asteroids. Especially since other companies (with varying degrees of credibility) are also making noises about asteroid mining. As my completely out-in-the-weeds suggestion, I'm going to go for flags-and-footprints on Mercury, possibly taking advantage of its deposits of water ice for crew consumables and ISRU.

You're very welcome! Just as another thought, if you ever end up doing anything with Red Moon, you might want to borrow or buy a copy of Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon. Not for the content - although that might spark some ideas - but the structure. The actual space travel part of Apollo was (obviously), fairly repetitive. Same booster, same spacecraft, very similar flight plans and for the most part, fairly similar mission objectives on the lunar surface, although having a rover added some variety to Apollos 15 through 17. Chaikin's book is a nice example of how to mix things up and (crucially) miss things out so that you end up seeing those similar missions from different angles and everything stays fresh. Even with something as dramatic as spaceflight, I found with my own writing that there was only so many times I could describe that awesome thunder of rocket engines or a booster tearing into orbit at insane velocities, or the tranquil beauty of sunrise from orbit, before it started getting a bit repetitive. Again - your mileage may, and probably will, vary. Your writing - your rules.

We get to meet the gang! Nice character sketches - and poor Lemcott and Doc. Although I'm getting a very Rogue One vibe here...

Actually, all of those could be fertile ground for worldbuilding and plot points. Take speed limits for example - we're talking about an interstellar trucker so does @NSEP's universe permit FTL travel? If FTL is a thing, how does it work? Not in a detailed, technical 'reroute the positron feed through the unobtainium matrix' sense but more generally? Are we talking some kind of point-to-point, instant jump capability, or something more like a warp drive where journey times between the stars can still take days or more? The whole tone and pace of the story is likely to be very different depending which option (or other options) you go for. Or take goods shipping and inventory. You probably wouldn't need (or want) giant slabs of exposition on how this all works but having some idea of how it all works behind the scenes lets you throw in the odd detail here or there and have those details be consistent throughout the story. Both of which help to set the scene of your story, or give it a particular feel. Knowing how your world works behind the scenes can also be helpful for letting you follow a chain of thought and seeing where it leads. As in 'my fictional invoicing system works like this... which means that that has to happen... and wait a minute, that means my protagonist can't do that, so has to do.... this instead. Which means that she's going to be totally borked in about two pages time. Or at least that's what I've found. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary! Edit - as a counterexample, I know another writer on this forum who takes almost exactly the opposite approach. He'll fit the worldbuilding around the story as required, rather than using it as a source of story. As I've thoroughly enjoyed his work, I can safely say that either approach works well.

Context is king here I think. How well do you know the person you're addressing by telling them they're looking good? How old are they relative to you? Are you at work? You're looking good today (or equivalent) might be completely appropriate if I was talking to my wife, or a good friend, much less so if I was talking to one of the younger support staff (of any gender) at work, whom I barely know, and then only in a work environment. Also - put the boot on the other foot. How would you feel if somebody told you you were looking good? Again, I'm thinking it would very much depend on context. Speaking for myself, it would be fine from a friend, especially if I was having a bad day and not feeling that good. Out of the blue from a woman I don't know? Macho bravado aside (cos I was pretty much at the back of the queue when they were handing that out), I think it would be an awkward situation at best, creepy at worst. And it doesn't take too many awkward situations to add up to harassment. #SpeakUp

Slightly tangential to this thread but I heard an interesting podcast about the archaelogical significance of space junk in general. It suggested something similar to @Nibb's suggestion - that if space tourism does take off , then tours of historical satellites, booster stages etc. might be a big thing.

"Hey, Sarge - what's that bubblin' noise?" "That's the plot, son. It's thickening."

Sounds promising and I'm liking your Mort already.

The cake is.... okay, you know how this goes.

Be Aware Real LIfe Sucks?

I'm reminded of some of the original 'Orbiter plus fly-back booster' plans for the Shuttle. Hopefully technology in the form of BFR is finally catching up with aspiration.

How advanced a civilization are we talking about here? If we're assuming access to some kind of FTL capability such that interstellar journeys can be completed within a reasonable fraction of the traveler's life time then I'd argue that all bets are off. To all intents and purposes, that civilization has access to an entire galaxy worth of raw materials and energy, plus the technological wherewithal to harness and exploit very substantial quantities of energy at a time. At that point, the decision whether or not to bother with planets almost becomes an aesthetic choice or a moral choice with access to raw materials becoming a secondary factor. With all that said, I like @daniel l.'s jewel analogy. A civilization that leaves inhabitable worlds as natural parks is a civilization that I'd want to be part of. Without FTL, we're trapped in the Sol system and here I think @Mitchz95 is right. Consider that the asteroid belt is estimated to only contain about 0.04 Moons worth of material. The Kuiper belt is estimated to contain about 200 times as much. That's still a lot but not so much on the scale of the whole solar system. The Oort Cloud is hypothesized to contain still more material but at a vast distance. (Put into context - Pioneers 10 and 11 haven't reached it yet.) The trade-offs between quantity of material and time/energy requirements to exploit that material become a lot more restrictive than they would be for our FTL capable super-civilization and, whilst I'd like to believe in a predominantly asteroid inhabiting civilization, I don't think planets could or would be ignored.

My God... it's full of stars.

It's the test flight for Zumba, which will be the all singing, all dancing version. I'll get my coat.