The archive
Articles
Everything published so far. New work goes up when it is ready, not on a schedule.
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Life Support Systems
Watney Was Lucky
The potatoes kept him alive for a year and a half. In a place nobody is coming to, that same plan takes your fat, your soil, and eventually you. What a crop list has to pay for, and why it is the hardest page in the manifest.
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Life Support Systems
Heirloom, or Nothing
An editorial position, stated up front: no modified seed goes into the habitat. Here is the best case against that, and why I still hold it.
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Life Support Systems
Two of Everything, and a Quarantine
Noah did not have to worry about what was living in the gut of the goat. We do. Which animals earn a berth in a sealed world, what each one costs, and the stowaways that beat the last crew that tried this.
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Life Support Systems
The Gas Nobody Budgets For
Everybody has a plan for oxygen. Nobody has one for the four-fifths of every breath that does nothing at all — and you cannot live without it.
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Soil and Survival
The Workforce Nobody Hired
My grandfather ran nitrate and manure over the same field for thirty years and never used the word bacteria. In a sealed habitat, you don’t get to not know.
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Life Lessons the Hard Way
The Gas That Doesn’t Leave
Biosphere 2 sealed out the weather. It also sealed out the one thing that was quietly cleaning its air, and nobody noticed until the gas built up enough to threaten the crew’s nervous systems.
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Life Support Systems
Top of the Loop, Bottom of the Loop
The two animals nobody budgets for, and what happened the last time we forgot them
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Life Support Systems
Light Is the Throttle
What a mine in Idaho and a garden in Alaska taught us about growing things fast — and what continuous daylight does to a plant that never gets to sleep
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Habitats
Commission It First
We have already run phase one. It cost one man 150 million dollars of his own money, and it very nearly killed the people inside.
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Life Support Systems
Life in the Barrel
O’Neill gave us the barrel in 1976 and got very little of it wrong. What he did not finish was the inside — and the standard the inside has to meet isn’t twenty years. It’s forever.
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Soil and Survival
Worms: The Backbone of Civilization
Why the first Martians will need a bucket of worms more than another rocket
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Robotics
Send the Robots First
Why the road to Mars runs through the moon, and why the first lunar miners will never leave Earth
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Soil and Survival
Wet the Ground and Wait
A passive water generator for the desert, and why we should build one before we need one on Mars
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Soil and Survival
Fish, Salt, or Dirt
Three ways to feed a habitat, what each one costs you, what each one can't survive, and a question for the reader.
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Soil and Survival
The Box Nobody Tested
In 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass to prove a closed world could keep them alive. It nearly didn't, and the reason was sitting in the walls the whole time.
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Resources
Send the Refinery, Not the Ore
Why the belt gets mined by factory ships, and why that is the one job we cannot run from a chair
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Resources
A Message in a Bottle, Thrown Hard
Every article in this magazine is about how to build something. This one is about how to pay for it.
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New technologies
Grind the Asteroid, Print the Part
Why there will never be a steel mill in space, and what replaces it
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New technologies
Powder or Wire
The two ways to print metal, why neither one is ready for the Belt, and the questions somebody has to answer first
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Habitats
Bones Don't Travel Well
The one problem no rocket solves, and why Gerard O'Neill worked out the answer in 1976
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Habitats
Blow the Rock Like Glass
My father's answer to how you build something big enough to spin, and the man who worked it out in 1963
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Habitats
Sixteen Inches of Steel
The number that breaks the mile-wide barrel, four ways around it, the one we would bet on, and a file you can print tonight
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Habitats
Launch the Parts, Not the Ship
You cannot launch a habitat big enough to spin. So you launch a shipyard, and you let the robots build it.
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New technologies
Built for Earth, or Built for Something Bigger?
The tools a colony needs are being perfected right now, by people who say they are building them for us
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New technologies
A Thousand Garages
Before there is a printer in space, there has to be a shipyard on the ground, and the shipyard does not have to be in one place
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New technologies
Thirty Thousand Volts and a Piece of Tin Foil
I drove an hour and a half to call a man a liar. He turned on a computer monitor instead, and I have been thinking about it for twenty years.
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New technologies
Out the Side of the Mountain
Twenty miles of vacuum tube under a Hawaiian volcano, and a freight train that never comes back down. What a ground-based mass driver would actually take, and why it exits the flank instead of the summit.
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New technologies
That’s Not a Rocket, It’s a Freight Train
How I wired the one on my bench in 1994, the one I drew and never built, and why a mass driver runs on railroad logic, not rocket logic.
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New technologies
Cold, Vacuum, and a Hundred Thousand Joints
What geosynchronous orbit does to the ten-inch panels in "A Thousand Garages," starting with the question every steel man asks first — and one thing that article got wrong.
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Mission Watch
Mission Watch: September 2026
What private enterprise and the agencies actually did this summer, in the order that matters
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From the editor
The Question I Asked Buzz Aldrin
In 1996 I asked the second man on the Moon what part private enterprise would play in space. Thirty years later, the answer is checkable
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Trade-offs
One Press or Ten Thousand
Elon Musk casts a car underbody in one shot with a machine the size of a house. We proposed ten thousand garages. It turns out we may both be right, on different walls — but nobody knows until somebody breaks fifty panels on purpose.
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Trade-offs
Cast It or Print It
Three ways to make a hundred thousand habitat panels. What each one buys you, what each one costs you, and where each one belongs. The first entry in a department that exists to write both columns down.
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New technologies
Powder or Plate
The garages stay. What's in them changes.
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Resources
Refuel It or Strip It
The graveyard belt is the closest junkyard we've got.
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Life Lessons the Hard Way
A Capability Is Not a Possession
Everything you take for granted is a chain of people who knew how. Set the house on the Moon and the chain is gone. The first link we follow down is glass.
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Mission Watch
Mission Watch: Late September 2026
Starship reached orbit on Monday, carried real cargo, and came home early. What that does and does not mean.
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