Peter’s Raw Materials

Category: Space

  • Culture Orbital animation, version 2

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    Science Fiction may not be everybody’s thing. But when you pull yourself away from mainstream SF movies like Star Wars and seek out some contemporary Science Fiction literature you might be pleasantly surprised. For me Science Fiction has always been more a literary thing, simply because I was reading books before I watched any SF on TV. I was in my early teens when I slipped into Science Fiction. The early 1970s. The Americans were still in the middle of sending men to…

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  • The Future of Humanity, part 2: what went wrong?

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    Let’s face it: Today we don’t live in the future we (or our parents) envisioned. Civilization was not eliminated or at least decimated by a nuclear war – at least not yet. TV hasn’t dumbed down all of society as predicted. But we also didn’t get our flying cars and there is definitely no big space station shaped like a wheel in earth orbit from which deep space missions are launched (as in 2001). I guess it’s a trade-off. In our everyday life…

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  • The Future of Humanity, part 1: so last century

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    When in the 1960s and 70s technology seemed to jump forward with new inventions and discoveries practically every week, with the crown of course being the first manned landing on the Moon by Apollo 11, it looked like it would only be a short two decades until we would have humans live in a  permanent Moon base and we would reach Mars shortly thereafter. Assuming that the movie 2001 by Stanley Kubrick tried to reflect the honest expectations of technology minded people we…

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  • From a garden shed to a gantry

    Since I was a kid a had a fascination with rockets, spaceships and other BIG stuff. I loved the Saturn V rocket. But the crawler, the huge vehicle carrying it from the assembly complex to the launch pad, and the gantry did it for me. This fascination with BIG hardware is what sucked me into Science Fiction and stuff like the Culture universe of Iain Banks. Here you are talking about space ships 30km long. I mean, that’s from Martinsville to Indianapolis! And…

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  • Science for the non-scientist

    I am a frustrated, castrated, suppressed mathematician, physicist, rocket engineer. I was born in 1960. Ok, Sputnik, was three years earlier. But when in 1968 Apollo 8 traveled around the Moon my granddad had already started giving me science books for birthdays and Christmas. The books about the U.S. space program were my favorites. From that time I have kept many notepads full of childish doodles of spaceships and astronauts. When, on July 20 1969, just three days before my ninth birthday, Neil…

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