If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, then perhaps you might consider taking a space flight with Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin. Interested?

The founder of Amazon told reporters on Tuesday that his company plans on offering space flights by 2018. Paying clients can expect to fly "more than 62 miles above Earth, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the planet set against the black sky of space." 

Here's an animated journey of what adventurers can expect to experience: https://www.blueorigin.com/astronaut-experience#youtube-YJhymiZjqc

To read more, go here.

Image source: BlueOrigin.com

Occasionally, I will pick up a book that I have never heard of because I like the cover and the title. That’s what I did with this book and look where it got me? SUCKED INTO YET ANOTHER SERIES. Curse all the cute kid books. They’re always sucking me in with their adorableness and I am left to deal with the consequences.

Reasons to read this book

• It features a talking alien cat nicknamed Pockets. This reminds me of that time when I was in third grade and wrote a story about an alien family whose dog started talking (but that’s beside the point.)
• Archie is 8 years 8 months 8 days old and his life is about to change. He is going to find out that his dad is not just any taxi driver; his dad is a space taxi driver. His dad travels across galaxies (and gets to use wormholes) to pick up his customers.
• An adorable father son relationship
• Aliens, outerspace, crime fighting cats!!!!!!
• Also cuteness.

I need to get my hands on book 2 soon...

Encounter with Tiber, by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes, is a hard science fiction story for fans of space travel and colonization of the Moon and Mars. The long book (570 pages plus a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke and biographies of the authors) contains two related stories framed within a future historian's voyage to Tiber.

One story starts with an alternative history of the end of the shuttle program and continues into the very near future with explorations of the Moon and Mars. This story is thick with detailed descriptions of technology and includes concepts familiar to fans of Aldrin's writing, like the Mars to Earth cycler spacecraft. Indeed, long stretches of this story seems to lay a plot on top of his non-fiction book, Mission to Mars. The second story tells of humanoids (very human in nature) who came to Earth in the past, seeking a new home for their doomed race. This story is similarly full of scientific details not needed to advance the plot or understand the characters; it describes being in space.

The book also deals with the politics of space. A recurring theme in both stories is 'political pressure leads to poor decisions and tragedy'. Since Aldrin has been part of NASA's space program for so long (yes, he is that Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon), it makes me wonder about the real-life events that led to this pervasive element.

Even in moments of strong plot action, the authors will divert into technical details, which can make the book slow to read. It requires more concentration than a typical fun summer vacation book, and several times I put it down for a while.

If you are not a hard science fiction/space fiction fan, you'll find this book tedious. If you love the details a space insider can provide, you'll be fascinated.