Once, Frederik Pohl, famed science fiction author, left us pondering a nugget of wisdom: A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. When dreaming up futures, we often overlook the very human challenges that such futures might present. But we need to remember, it’s us people living there, muddling through the everyday problems that future tech will inevitably toss our way.
This holds true even when our future is projected into outer space.
In October 2021, a rocket engineer from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)…
