Dr. Beth Biller. I loved having you in our SiS “Fringe in Space” subgroup. Thanks for letting me take you out to dinner and quiz you about which star would be best to set Cavendish around. She was the one who calculated how long the year would be and what the sun would look like on Cavendish from the surface.

Dr. James Lough. Thank you for answering all of my questions on getting to the speed of light and breaking my brain with special relativity until I realised perhaps using the Alcubierre Drive would be simpler than laser kites in space (which is the current best postulation of how to get to those kinds of speeds!).

Cyanophages, Cavendish and Climate Change

Dr. Sinéad Collins, my friend and evolutionary biologist and algae expert—she’s basically Naomi except not an astronaut. She read over the algae and cyanophage sections and also came up with a better way to solve Naomi’s problem on the ship with spontaneous resistance. Additionally, she helped me figure out what Cavendish would actually look like, and what it’s like to go to Antarctica. Thank you to her Evolution, Ecology & Climate Change undergraduate class at the University of Edinburgh who helped me brainstorm what Earth would look like from orbit under the worst case projections in 2033 (which is mentally when I set it as that’s when NASA is potentially planning to send a mission to Mars).

Dr. Maté Ravasz, molecular biologist. Thank you for your talk at the Scotland in Space seminar at the Royal Observatory and answering my email questions and letting me know about cyanophages in the first place.

In general, researching climate change for this book was incredibly distressing, as I knew it would be. We need to do our part to make sure Earth has many years left, and that includes holding those at the top responsible for making policy decisions than have much greater effects. Shout out to the teen climate activists, Autumn Peltier, Mari Copeny, Atemisa Xakriabá, Alexandria Villaseñor, Vic Barrett, Ridhima Pandey, Xiye Bastida, Greta Thunberg, and many more, whose determined faces and words I saw and heard on the news as I was writing this book. I think you’ll be about Naomi’s age by the time we reach when the book is set. Thanks for fighting for the future.

Babies… in Space!

Thank you to Juliet’s assistant, Liza DeBlock, for letting me know that her mother, the inimitable Dr. Heidi DeBlock, looks after astronaut health. Thank you, Heidi, for giving me details about HELLP syndrome and for introducing me to your friend and human spaceflight expert, Dr. John Charles, former Head of Life Sciences at the Houston Space Center. John, thank you so much for saving my space baby. It must have seemed a very odd question when you first read it, but I hope you enjoy seeing the full draft in context.

Space Law & Policy