2015

Starship: Mercenary by Mike Resnick (Italian edition)

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The novel “Starship: Mercenary” by Mike Resnick was published for the first time in 2007. It is the third novel in the “Starship” series and follows “Starship: Pirate”.

After rebelling, the crew of the former Republic starship Theodore Roosevelt spent a period in which they were pirates but it wasn’t the right choice. Now Captain Wilson Cole started offering the starship and crew’s services as mercenaries selecting jobs to keep certain ethical and moral values.

Wilson Cole is assisted by the alien who calls himself David Copperfield in finding paid jobs but the ones he found tend to be really dangerous. Cole decides to reach a space station that is important as a leisure center but also for contacts in the frontier. There, he and his crew will find new opportunities but also new dangers.

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OneWeb, Ltd announced plans to launch a series of satellites in low Earth orbit to bring telephone services and especially broadband Internet worldwide. The first investors investors are Qualcomm, an American semiconductor and telecommunications company, and the Virgin Group with its founder, Sir Richard Branson, personally committed.

OneWeb was in talks with Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, for a partnership, but the ideas were different concerning the constellation’s architecture. It’s for this reason that Musk has just announced his own similar project that seems more ambitious considering that he also intends to bring the Internet into space, until Mars to connect future colonies. It’s a project even more expensive since we’re talking about a $10 billion investment.

The Falcon 9 first stage crashing on the automated platform (Image courtesy Elon Musk / SpaceX. All rights reserved)

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On January 10, 2015, after having successfully launched the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, the first stage of the rocket Falcon 9 SpaceX attempted a controlled landing on an automated marine platform. A few hours later news arrived that the first stage had reached the platform but had landed too fast, smashing into pieces. Yesterday Elon Musk, SpaceX founder, released the impressive pictures of the event.

Jeri Ryan in 2012

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On January 16, 1995 the TV show “Star Trek: Voyager” made its debut, set in the same period as the show “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, which at that time was still on the air.

I think “Star Trek: Voyager” has more flaws than merits and is the show that marked the decline of Star Trek. It lasted seven seasons but it failed to fulfill its potential. Instead of boldly going where no one had gone before, it’s the show that started going lazily where everyone had already gone before.

Robert Silverberg in 2013

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Robert Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. As a child he already read a lot and he was just a teenager when he started sending stories to science fiction magazines. He earned a BA in English literature from Columbia University in 1956. During his career he’s written an incredible amount of science fiction and occasionally fantasy stories. For some time he devoted himself mostly to other genres and historical articles.