In Jo Lennan’s short story Day Zero, journalist Sebastian lives up among the stars in a frontier community in space.
It’s a whole new world. And yet Sebastian faces the same worries he would at home: a receding hairline; issues with his stoic but distant girlfriend; stories being spiked by editors. Not to mention the slow-burning conflict at space’s outer fringes and, finally, a devastating cancer diagnosis.
As in Day Zero, space colonisation remains the stuff of science fiction – confined to the pages of books and movies. Proponents, however, say we are getting closer.
Leading the charge are entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who plans to send the first humans to Mars by 2026 via his company SpaceX – with the goal, eventually, of creating long-term settlements on the Red Planet. Meanwhile, Bigelow Aerospace, founded by another visionary billionaire, Robert Bigelow, is building expandable commercial space habitats,
