The Ross 248 Project

Les Johnson is a futurist, author, and NASA technologist. Publishers Weekly noted that “The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries is alive and well . . .” when describing his novel, Mission to Methone. His most recent novels, The Spacetime War and Saving Proxima (with co-author, Travis S. Taylor), were published in 2021. In his day job at NASA, Les leads the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout mission that will use a 925 square foot solar sail to propel a small spacecraft to rendezvous with an asteroid.

Ken Roy is a retired professional engineer. His career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of Fire Protection and Nuclear Safety. As a long-time hobby he has been working with the idea of terraforming. He invented the “Shell Worlds” concept as a way to terraform planets and large moons well outside the star’s Goldilocks’ zone and under stars that have a radically different spectrum from that provided by our sun. Ken has authored multiple papers on terraforming and space colonization that have appeared in JBIS and Acta Astronautica.