[Mural of Ray Bradbury by Richard Wyatt; the mural is located at Los Angeles High School, which Ray attended.] With the onset of the Artemis missions and rockets going up on a regular basis (and with a frequency that exceeds some bus services) it seems we once more live in a science fictional age, with the boundary between the imagined and the actual overlapping like never before. Rocketry was always the stuff of dreams, something Ray Bradbury understood very well when he emp

I tried to imagine what it would feel like. Getting inside the cramped capsule, the heavy hatch closing, strapping yourself in, going through the endless checklists. Waiting for the moment of separation; the sense of floating free of the station. Looking back at the place that had been, for a while at least, both home, sanctuary, and lonely outpost at the summit of the sky. Watching it fall away. And then the ride back down: the capsule ablating, losing layers of itself as th

Their eyes the night before on the pale tracery of the Moon, rotund in a penumbral sky, as finely wrought as da Vinci sketch, the waiting rocket pointing the way like a Norman tower, its ancient roots long-sunk in the tidal wash of a water meadow, trailing pale vapours as from the armoured carapace of a slumbering Quetzalcoatl, the same breath that would soon become an incandescent roar, countdown done, engines on, prayers said, a vibration in the very marrow of their bones