My short story "West": Two UFO hunters in the late 50s travel through central Nevada's wastelands to a extraterrestrial hotspot in the hopes that they will finally have a visitation. cornerbarmagazine.com/pdfs/corner-...

Hello #Portfolioday I'm a space artist as well as a short story writer. Here's some images, link to a summery short story in the following post.

The ship would be assembled in Earth orbit, and use a Zond-like capsule to carry the crew from Earth up to the MEK.

MEK "Aelita" over Mars. The MEK was a Soviet design for a crewed landing on Mars. The ship would have used a nuclear-electric engine with a round trip mission time of 630 day. The reactor is at upper left, at the other end is the MPK lander.

Space Docking Operations

HALCA / Haruka, a Japanese orbital radio telescope in operation from 1997 to 2005.

HALCA / Haruka was a Japanese space-based radio telescope active from 1997 - 2005, used for Very Long Baseline Interferometry. Space radio telescopes are surprisingly rare. Counting HALCA, only four have been launched.

I have a new short story out: "Ambient Radiation". It's a hard sci-fi space archeology story with realistic space combat and speculative biology. (Link below)

Spaceflight concepts for the next century: NOAA Wexler Research Station, International Mercury Explorer, Mustang Personal Shuttle, Lunar Cycler

Project UPWARD mapping the moon. This was a joint NRO / NASA plan to send an Apollo capsule to photograph lunar landing sites using a modified recon satellite.

Check out my new story "An Occurrence in Paderbühl" (link below) The year is 1651 and the village of Paderbühl in the Holy Roman Empire is recovering from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War. One September night, the fragile peace is threatened by a strange being in the sky.

Before the Lunar Orbiters were built, NASA and the NRO developed a top secret backup: Project UPWARD. This would have had a Apollo CSM carry a modified KH-8 recon satellite to photograph landing sites. Despite being cancelled, the project details remained classified until 2010.

The American Venus concept was developed during the Apollo Applications Program. It would have used a "wet workshop" concept. The spacecraft was primarily a S-IVB rocket stage. The stage would send the ship towards Venus, then the astronauts would live inside the spent fuel tank.

MAVR was an update to a spacecraft called the TMK, which was originally designed for a Mars mission. During the studies, the Soviet engineers realized that they could incorporate a Venus flyby on the return leg.

Two crewed Venus mission concepts from the Space Race: the Soviet MAVR and American AAP Venus Flyby.

Lunar Orbiter over the moon. The Lunar Orbiters were a series of five satellites that NASA used to map the moon before sending the Apollo crews to it.

Happy #pridemonth 🏳️‍🌈, check out my short story "FPV", a near-future short story in which a burnt-out FPV drone vet and a non-binary hacktivist team up to expose the corporate coverup of an SSTO spaceplane crash. Link below, published in Blood+Honey. #shortstory #scifi

Before they could land on the moon, NASA needed to photograph potential landing sites. To do this, they built the Lunar Orbiter. Five of these were flown between 1966 and 1967. Together, they identified twenty landing sites and mapped 99% of the moon's surface.

The best four books I read this spring.

Sulis 1: my design for crewed solar exploration vessel based on the astrology symbol for the sun. At the front of the ship is a massive sunshield, which protects the spinning habitat ring for the crew.

Space mine deployment

A Planetes inspired space mine.

Went to NYC recently. Took some pictures.

There sure was! Here's some renders I made of it: a crewed Apollo Venus flyby.

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) was a mission from 2001 to 2010 that made all-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background, the radiation left over from the recombination epoch, roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

NASA flew a similar mission in support of the Apollo program, called the Pegasus satellite. The micrometeorite collectors were built into a pair of wings that deployed from the top of a Saturn I second stage.

Head-on view of the Apollo Applications Micrometeorite Collector, an unflown concept to use surplus Apollo hardware after the moon landings. Each of the petals held seven sample collecting boxes.

Apollo Applications Program Micrometeorite Collector, one of the many unflown concepts from the program. The petals would have folded around the central truss to fit inside the top of the S-IVB. #spaceart #alternatehistory

Happy Pride Month. Check out my short story "Prophet 60091" in @thepinkhydra.com: a #lgbtq+ romance with (probably) correct orbital mechanics. #shortstory #indielit #writesky #scifi (link below)