The New Yorker
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The DART mission, in which a spacecraft knocked an asteroid off course, is a rehearsal for saving the world.
David Brown
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Author of THE MISSION (Custom House, 2021) and THE OUTSIDE CATS (Mariner, forthcoming). Words for the New Yorker, &c. // INACTIVE ACCOUNT. Text me instead.
David Brown’s Journalist Portfolio
View as a gridA Wine Tasting at the End of the World
Pix
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The RV Araon was one small ship of many docked in Lyttelton Harbor on the morning of January 3, 2022, its sunset-orange hull cast into relief against a cobalt New Zealand sky. From stem to stern and keel to masthead, the ship's crew crawled about with welding torches, tools, and paintbrushes in preparation for a long voyage ahead.
NASA's Nuclear Option May Be Crucial for Getting Humans to Mars
Scientific American
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The pathway to humans on Mars lies through the atom, split. Far from Earth, whether in the void or on another world, power is life. A steady, strong flow of electricity is as crucial for operating computers and engines as it is for assuring access to corporeal necessities such as light and heat, breathable air and potable water, and preparation or even growth of food.
Why NASA Launched a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy
The New York Times
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In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits.
How to Plan a Space Mission
The New Yorker
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Rob Weryk discovered an interstellar object in his hotel room at the Marriott in Provo, Utah. Weryk, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii, was in town for the forty-ninth meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.
This Robot's Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica
The New York Times
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NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. CASEY STATION, Antarctica - Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Adélie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools.
NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon
The New York Times
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The restored room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back.
NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan
The New York Times
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The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a "Shark Tank"-like competition that lasted two and a half years. NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
The Odyssey of OSIRIS-REx
The Week Magazine (US)
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The main entrance to Kennedy Space Center materializes at the end of a six-mile stretch of road, the 405, a thin black ribbon laid across the Indian River. Down this runway of a highway every morning, the orange Florida sun rises dead ahead, its rays dancing on the Indian, and all is flat and wide, horizon and water alike, and on the narrow banks running along the road, separating asphalt from fresh water, the occasional sabal palmetto springing from thickets of reeds waist-high. If you are an astronaut and you're driving to work, Cape Canaveral is as indelible a vista of Earth as you might want before climbing into your capsule and flying to space.
When Congress Puts NASA on Hold, Planets Don't Wait
The New York Times
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The United States asks NASA to do an extraordinary amount with very little money. Explore Mars, document climate change, stop doomsday asteroids, find life on Europa - all for less than one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget. But budget uncertainties on Capitol Hill, including delays in federal appropriations legislation and temporary government shutdowns, measurably harm the American space program.
Space Exploration's Dark Future
Vox
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One by one they flickered to life. Venus, first, in 1962, and two and a half years later, Mars. Our spacecraft flew by those planets, orbited them, and became man made meteors streaking toward the first soil we couldn’t generically call "earth." Later, when we grew ambitious and confident in our abilities, humanity reached for the outer planets, probing Jupiter and Saturn in 1973 and 1979. Each mission turned conjecture into fact, invalidated old assumptions, and brought us closer to one day answering the two fundamental questions of existence: where did all this come from, and where is it headed?
The Littlest Boy
Foreign Policy Magazine
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The 1950s and '60s were a golden age of nuclear weapons design. Scientists and technicians at the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories succeeded in miniaturizing the so-called "physics packages" at the core of atomic bombs from the nearly 10,000-plus-pound behemoth used in the first-ever nuclear test to smaller warheads that could fit atop a missile. Then they got smaller, and the Army put these small nuclear bombs in backpacks for use by Special Forces units, who would parachute behind enemy lines and make nuclear war an intimate affair.
Roddy Doyle, Master of Working-Class Family Drama
The Atlantic
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There are readers of Roddy Doyle's fiction, and then there are readers, and I confess to falling into the latter group. I didn't fly to Dublin specifically to pick up an early copy of The Guts, his latest book, but it would have been a terrible personal failure had I returned home empty-handed.