Ken Roy Author & Editor

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 coauthor Travis S. Taylor), were published in 2021. In his day job at NASA, Les is the Chief Technologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center where he leads the center’s development of next-generation space technologies—including solar sails, which he believes will eventually take us to the stars.

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.