space-engineering

The engineering challenges of permanent Mars settlement: life support systems, radiation shielding, food production, water extraction, and in-situ resource utilization.

A ringworld would not break any law of physics, but it would break every material we know. The spin arithmetic shows exactly where each megastructure sits on the ladder from buildable to impossible.

The asteroid belt contains enough metal to give every human being 100 billion dollars' worth. It also contains the raw materials to build hundreds of thousands of O'Neill habitats. Here's what asteroid mining would actually look like — and what it would do to the world economy.

In September 2022, NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately hit a small asteroid and shortened its orbit by about 33 minutes. It was the first real test of planetary defense. Here is how humanity finds, tracks, and might one day redirect a dangerous asteroid.