As I discussed in my last post, the search for signs of extraterrestrial life has caught the interest of many people for a very long time, and the specific search for signals from other life forms has been a particular source of fascination over the last 50 years. In the 1997 movie Contact Jodie Foster's… Continue reading SETI
Author: Steve Hurley
Hi I am Steve Hurley. Although I work in the IT industry. I studied for a PhD in astronomy in the 1980s. My real passion is explaining scientific concepts to a non-scientific audience. My blog (explainingscience.org) covers various scientific topics, but primarily astronomy. It is written in a style that it is easily understandable to the non scientist.
Publications and videos
For links to my books and videos please visit www.explainingscience.org
Is There Anyone Out There ?
As a child I was fascinated by the idea of people from Earth encountering alien lifeforms. I was an avid watcher of Star Trek and the British science fiction TV shows Dr Who and Blake's 7. I am not alone in my fascination - the idea of humans making contact with intelligent aliens from other planets has intrigued… Continue reading Is There Anyone Out There ?
Space Tourism into Orbit and Beyond
Getting Into Orbit Although Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is likely to be the first spacecraft to offer mass space tourism, it only offers space tourists a short hop into space for a few minutes. (See my previous post from 5 August "The Virgin Galactic Experience" for more information.) To remain in space, a spacecraft must travel at… Continue reading Space Tourism into Orbit and Beyond
The Virgin Galactic Experience
The era of mass space tourism is about to begin. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is about to launch. It is based upon SpaceShipOne, which was an experimental spacecraft which won a $10 million dollar prize for being the first privately built spacecraft to travel to an altitude of 100 km. This, as you may remember from my… Continue reading The Virgin Galactic Experience
Space Tourism
This post is about space tourism, which means ordinary people travelling into space for leisure purposes and paying to do so. This is a subject which has always been of great interest to me and although the market is very small at the moment I think it will grow over the coming decades. With the… Continue reading Space Tourism
Explaining Science 