Sunday, November 23, 2014

Writing on space travel - by Chris Jones and others

After growing tired of waiting for the print edition of Esquire to arrive in the mail, I purchased for $2.99 the story "Away" written by Chris Jones and found it to be a great piece with the below opening...

"In March, astronaut Scott Kelly will undertake the longest space mission in American history. He and a cosmonaut will begin an uninterrupted year aboard the International Space Station—a year exposed to the strange and deep effects of weightlessness, acute stress, isolation, and cosmic radiation. It is the most ambitious manned space mission in years. And it will also be the first step in a human expedition to Mars."

Reading the name Scott Kelly brought to mind a past story from Jones on an astronaut with the same last name and finding that piece gave me the thought of linking here to other great space related writing I've posted on...

- "Mark Kelly, American" by Jones for Esquire in Nov 2011... about the husband of Gibby Giffords & brother of Scott Kelly.

- "Go" by Jones for Esquire in Jan 2009... about the importance of the U.S. manned space program.

Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space, a 2007 book by Jones... about the astronauts on the International Space Station at the time of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.


An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, a 2013 book by Chris Hadfield, retired Canadian astronaut, known by many for his rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity song, a video now with 24M and counting views on YouTube.

"Welcome to the Real Space Age" by Dan P. Lee for New York Magazine in May 2013... on private space travel.

"The Hardest Thing to Do in Space" by Mike Sager for Esquire in Dec 2012... on NASA Mars Curiosity rover engineer Tom Rivellini.

"Triumph of His Will" by Tom Junod for Esquire in Nov 2012... on Elon Musk, founder of Space X.

- "Astronauts Ready for Rescue Mission They Hope Never Happens" by John Zarrella for CNN in May 2009... about space shuttle Endeavour and its crew on standby during a mission of shuttle Atlantis.