Second Home

About this book

Second Home begins with a choice. Everyone wants to go to Mars; the Moon is dull, grey, airless, been there. But the Moon is three days away and Mars is six months, and a rescue from the Moon is a long weekend while a rescue from Mars is a year, and the Moon has, it turns out, almost everything a first settlement needs. In the company of the series' familiar circle, a curious narrator, an astrophysicist, a sceptical physicist, a graduate student, and two new companions, a habitat engineer who designs places for people to live off the Earth and a young woman who has applied to the first migration and is waiting to hear, the book makes the case for the Moon first, and then does the hard, honest work of asking what it would actually take.