Each morning, the flight crew is awoken by a song, hand-picked by Mission Control specialists back home on Earth. The long-standing practice keeps astronauts on schedule and connects them to the rest of humanity.
The crew is scheduled to splash down tomorrow evening (April 10th), off the coast of San Diego. Stay tuned for that, and for the final entry in their wake-up playlist!
Every writer has strengths and… not strengths. One of the areas I personally like to work on is grounding, which is where you invite readers into a scene and help them feel at home in your story.
In this episode of the long-running podcast Writing Excuses, Erin Roberts, DongWon Song, and Mary Robinette Kowal focus on ways to do just that.
Grounding a reader starts in the very first lines of a story. Where are we? Who are we with? What kind of story are we in? Our hosts explore how emotion, context, and sensory detail work together to create immersion, and why action alone isn’t enough without an emotional lens.
It’s only 20 minutes long and includes a helpful writing exercise to get you going.
If you’ve realized that (for example) just being dropped into the middle of a gunfight wasn’t enough to engage your audience, or your reader said “I wasn’t quite sure where I was at first,” this advice could help!
Since my recent posts have spent a lot of time in space, let’s take a slight break from the nonfiction drama of NASA’s Artemis II mission and shift over to the fictional world of space adventure.
In his books, Andy Weir (The Martian) works hard to bring scientific accuracy to his fiction. The challenge is balancing the demands of a thrilling story with the science that grounds it in reality.
While “Project Hail Mary” has its share of explosions and catastrophes, it’s the thinking that’s thrilling. Grace and Rocky must come together, with tools and whiteboards, craft and ingenuity, to solve a seemingly insoluble problem. They make mistakes, but they learn from those mistakes and from each other.
… when I walked out of a recent preview screening of the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 science fiction novel Project Hail Mary, I had tears of joy in my eyes. The filmmakers had done justice not just to the original story, but also to the science at the heart of it.
From NASA, with lots of interesting subsidiary links:
Let NASA shed some light: Explore the resources below to learn the science facts fueling the science fiction.
(Wait, Tau Ceti was also featured in fiction by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson? And was the setting for Barbarella? This planet gets around!)
The final assessment of the science? Not perfect, but good. And precisely accurate or not, this promises to be another very entertaining movie. (I’ve read the book but haven’t seen the film yet. Yes, I am a little behind the curve!)
Since we’re here, how about an article on the movie as a climate parable? (warning, spoilers!)
A quick update from the solar system’s coolest road trip: the Artemis II mission just set a new distance record, going farther into space than the Apollo 13 astronauts did in 1970.
“There was a moment about an hour ago where Mission Control Houston reoriented our spacecraft as the sun was setting behind the Earth. And I don’t know what we all expected to see at that moment, but you could see the entire globe, from pole to pole. You could see Africa, Europe, and if you looked really close, you could see the northern lights. It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.” — mission commander Reid Wiseman
“I gave myself permission to care, because there are a lot of people in this world who are afraid of caring, who are afraid of showing they care because it’s uncool. It’s uncool to have passion. It’s so much easier to lose when you’ve shown everyone how much you don’t care if you win or lose. It’s much harder to lose when you show that you care, but you’ll never win unless you also stand to lose. I’ve said it before. Don’t be afraid of your passion, give it free reign, and be honest and work hard and it will all turn out just fine.” ― Tom Hiddleston
The Artemis II Orion spacecraft has launched, and the mission is underway!
There is also a livestream from Orion itself (claustrophobes need not apply), but availability is spotty due to bandwidth and popularity. Because space!
The countdown has begun! Tomorrow is the first April launch date for the Artemis II flight. (If the weather or tech doesn’t cooperate, the mission will be pushed forward, so the next couple of days could be interesting!)
The countdown for NASA’s Artemis II test flight is underway at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with members of the launch team arriving at their consoles inside the Rocco Petrone Launch Control Center. The onsite countdown clock started ticking down at 4:44 p.m. EDT to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1.
The Americans who blazed the trail to the moon more than half a century ago were white men chosen for their military test pilot experience. This first Artemis crew includes a woman, a person of color and a Canadian, products of a more diversified astronaut corps.
Speaking of the comparison to Apollo, what else is different, how are they similar, is that an excellent graphic showing time and trajectory (yes!) and more:
NASA has announced that Artemis II’s journey around the Moon will be available to track online and via a downloadable app called Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW).
And here’s what it will be like inside Firing Room 1 a.k.a. Mission Control:
…who has the Artemis II astronauts’ backs as they make the 10-day, roughly 685,000-mile journey around the moon, aboard a rocket and spacecraft that haven’t carried humans before? And what does it take to work in the high-stakes, behind-the-scenes roles that keep astronauts safe and the mission on track?
Because astronauts are just the most visible part of what it takes to get a project like this off the ground. Here’s to the engineers, adventurers, and dreamers too!
You must be logged in to post a comment.