With the current race / dick contest happening in the space industry right now, and the whole discussion on colonising the Moon or Mars or whatever, the book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith arrived at the right time for me.

Let’s be frank, of the two Weinersmith, I only knew Zach and his long-running webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, though I was aware they published Soonish together a few years ago and had been considering reading buying. So I knew what to expect regarding the tone of the book but had no idea of the technical or scientific aspects.

What is it about

Let’s be clear : both authors are geeks. They LOVE the stuff they are discussing, they love space and it shows. No detail is minor to be irrelevant. Even if they edited a few things out, they still managed to put the anecdote in the footnote. The book is packed with facts, anecdotes, humour, interviews…

It is also extremely down to Earth (badumm tkss).

The starting point is the current space race is happening but that their is a lot of

  • moving fast and breaking things
  • marketing not based on reality
  • disregard of 80 years of space research, experiments, action and reflection.

So they dissect the elements needed to actually establish a presence in outer space and discuss the different solutions envisioned, their limitations and the current state of the research or practice. And they do cover a lot of aspects. From biology and psychology to habitat to orbital mechanics to international (interorbital?) law to space company towns.

I really liked the approach they used. It is extremely close to a definition of the engineer mindset I encountered recently.

To make it simple : an engineer has to think of failure. This is the main thing they have to think of. Not because they are pessimist, but because they should aim to helping everyone so that anyone can use their stuff safely. First identify everything that will fuck up, they make sure it doesn’t.

And the book uses the same thought process. Here is what we want to do, here are the challenges, here are the solutions considered right now, all have strong points and weak points and miss X or Y element, here are what domain experts have gathered along the years and here is the current direction the research is going. So here what people in the field are working on to address the problem.

There is no turn-key solution.

It may seem dry and the whole section dedicated to international and space law might look like it is but, in the end, humour and real anecdotes, often absurd, balance everything really well. It is a breeze to read.

Final world

I am not deeply interested in the topic but liked the book, the balance between humour and science and the whole thing.