Until recently there was a huge geeky talking point based on establishing a colony on Mars. Several billionaires took an interest, notably SpaceX's boss, while there was even the suggestion that a Mars colony could be run as a TV show, like an extraterrestrial Big Brother. The wilder speculation has now died down, but the idea of living on Mars still has a strong niche following.  In Becoming Martian , Scott Solomon gives us an in-depth and engaging look at the difficulties faced in moving to our nearest semi-inhabitable planet, which are considerable. As Solomon points out, the idea of terraforming Mars, giving it a breathable atmosphere and enough greenhouse gasses to warm it up a bit, is simply impractical - even if such a massive effort could be achieved, the combination of relatively low gravity, limited nitrogen and no magnetic field would mean the new atmosphere would be quickly lost again. This means that would-be Martians will have to protect themselves permanently from ra...

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines.   In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

I’ll get onto the details of this specific book a bit further down, but first it’s worth taking a more general look at the series of which it’s the latest instalment. Coming from Reaktion Books, the series is called Kosmos and several of the previous titles have already been reviewed on this site – on Mercury ,  Venus , Mars , Saturn , Uranus and Neptune  and Asteroids . Looking back at those reviews, there’s a clear common theme. They’re all nice-looking, lavishly illustrated books that are packed to overflowing with information – sometimes, as with Mercury or Saturn, on subjects that rarely get a whole book to themselves. On the downside – as far as this site is concerned, anyway – they aren’t popular science books by any meaningful definition of the term.  Here's an analogy. Imagine buying a large-format, nicely illustrated book called, say, The Himalayas . You’d expect it to cover the geography and culture of the region and the history of its exploration, but you’d be...

It has always seemed that combining fiction and non-fiction should be a good way to put popular science across. After all, SF provides a great vehicle for exploring places where we can't actually go. In practice, though, it seems extremely difficult to successfully pull off the crossover without the result seeming overly contrived. Thankfully, John Moores and Jesse Rogerson make it work well. It's interesting to make a comparison with Interstellar Tours , which takes a tour of our galaxy on a fictional starship. There, the setting is provided by fiction, but what's experienced around the galaxy is based on best current science. In Daydreaming in the the Solar System we stick to our near neighbourhood: each location from the Moon out to Pluto starts with a short fictional account of 'being there', followed by a chapter on the science behind that scene. This is like a more effective version of the approach attempted with mixed results in the Springer Science and Fict...

The cover image and title font leave little doubt that this book is targeted at fans of blockbuster sci-fi movies – which these days means a sizable fraction of the general population. That’s a great marketing ploy, because if potential readers paid too much attention to the words ‘real science’ tucked away in the subtitle, then the audience might shrink to a small fraction of the size. It’s a sad fact that space is only seen as cool when it’s fictional; as soon as it becomes factual then it’s strictly for science nerds only. The most obvious reason is that, outside science fiction, there’s barely any ‘human interest’ angle to space. On top of that, once you get above the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s almost impossible to give a proper explanation of how objects behave and interact without recourse to at least GCSE-level physics. So I have to give Andrews top marks for avoiding both these pitfalls. He picks the one astronomical topic that really does have a human angle – a potential collisi...

This is long-time Mars enthusiast Robert Zubrin's paean to the red planet. It's fascinating in two ways. One is the detail of what it would be like to try to get to and live on Mars that Zubrin gives us... the other is as a psychological study of a particularly American mindset. Underlying a lot of the practicalities side of the book is that fundamental limit of the space traveller, the rocket equation. Zubrin makes heave use of it to show just how much material (human or otherwise) SpaceX's Starship vehicle could get to Mars (or away from it). There is no doubt that there's a really important point here - how much commercial space vehicles, particularly those of SpaceX, have transformed the economics of spaceflight and the potential for sufficient numbers of people and volume of stuff to get to Mars and make settling vaguely feasible. He also draws an interesting contrast between resources and raw materials, pointing out that only the latter are theoretically limited i...

If you ask someone to describe a telescope, they will probably come up with a big tube in a dome, perhaps located somewhere remote on top of a mountain. But, in reality, many of our most important telescopes are now located in space - not only does this relieve them of the distorting effects of weather and atmosphere, they can be used 24/7. Despite their importance, and plenty of books showing of the images they produce, space telescopes don't get the coverage they deserve as objects of interest in their own right, so this book is welcome. In giving it four stars, I am primarily thinking of an audience with more than a passing interest in astronomy, though Andrew May's text is generally approachable. We start with an introduction to space and telescopes, move on to the big name most have heard of - the Hubble space telescope and then look at some specific topics where such telescopes have had a big impact, such as looking back in time to near the Big Bang, searching for exoplan...

The subtitle of this book contains an important question when talking about settling space: 'Have we really thought this through?' - and in around 400 pages this key question is answered with an extremely thorough 'No way.' The Weinersmiths (as they refer to themselves) hammer many nails into the coffin of the science fictional idea that space is in some ways comparable to the kind of frontiers that were historically crossed on Earth. I was always aware that the obstacles were huge, but this book makes clear just how overwhelmingly enormous they are - and how many of them are pretty much ignored by enthusiasts for settling on the Moon, on Mars or in space habitats. One topic the Weinersmiths cover in depth is the geopolitics of space, saying pretty well everyone ignores it. Admittedly, there has been a significant book this year dedicated to it ( The Future of Geography/Astropolitics by Tim Marshall), but, that apart, the legal pitfalls and how nations will react to an...

New books about astronomy, aimed at general readers, are coming out all the time. The most obvious reason for this is that it’s a subject that never stands still, and even a book written five years ago can look dated to anyone who keeps up with the latest theories and discoveries. While authors are scarcely likely to complain about the ongoing demand for new books, they may struggle to find a sufficiently fresh angle to make their latest contribution stand out from its predecessors. Yet that’s what Brian Clegg has done brilliantly well in Interstellar Tours , which presents what might have been a pretty standard account of the make-up of our galaxy from a strikingly different perspective. Clegg asks us to imagine we are 22nd-century tourists taking a short cruise around the galaxy on a starship that’s capable of jumping, more or less instantaneously, to any point within a 100,000-light-year sphere centred on the Earth. This much is science fiction, because there’s no way it could be ma...