You want your orbit to be stable, right? What's up with geostationary orbit around Mars? Speaking of Mars, astronauts travelling to Mars and then back to Earth will suffer poor health without gravity. A spinning space ship could work. How fast would it need to spin? In my spinning space ship, when I drop a wrench, how far will I have to chase it? All of this is pretty easy to calculate once you know how.

Despite blowing up prototypes, SpaceX is making amazing progress toward reusable interplanetary spacecraft with hundred ton payloads. While the details change every day, it's time to review where they are and think about what this means for the not very distant future and and the expansion of our "playground" for real.

We all have a rough idea of what constitutes disability in our human world, specifically in American culture. What would be a severe disability to an alien but not to us? Where losing a sense of smell might be somewhat limiting to humans, how would that affect a being in a civilization of dogs-creatures? What about an intelligent plant-creature with no roots? What if everyone but you had the ability to jack into an immersive virtual cyberpunk world? What alien or "future" disabilities have al...

Tropes are one of the building blocks of stories, but they can be misused, overused, and just plain worn out. How can you use tropes effectively in your writing? What are some stories that have done to well? Let's talk about using tropes, with and without flipping them around.

We have to eat when we send people beyond Earth's surface. What has been done so far to prepare for that need?

Many a good story teller have appeared to be good writers because of their editors, and many good writers produce amazing works for the same reason. Learn about some of the things that an editor brings to your writing and why they are worth their weight in gold.

How and How Long will it take to get from here to there in space? G. David Nordley will provide some rules of thumb for constructing timelines that involve interplanetary and interstellar journeys. Along the way, he will point out where conventional wisdom is seriously oversimplified in a conservative way, and where one may need to make some hard choices between what is possible and what one might want for a plot.