The 49th Lunar Legacies Space Memorabilia Auction will be conducted online via LiveAuctioneers and will take place on Saturday, January 24, 2026. The auction will be fully uploaded by January 15, 2026, and bidding links will be provided at that time.

Our next step is to determine the Top 5 landing sites and destinations that are optimal for charting roads on Mars. To date, we have located 3 out of 8 Martian roads: Tharsis Cave Loop, Mark Watney Highway and Ray Bradbury Road. Connecting the Mars landing sites is another useful exercise, allowing for the definition of "safety zones" within, but not between, different countries, using locations defined by international researchers. We are actively seeking clients to commission our Mars maps, with 8 inaugural roads.

By the time I joined NASA in 1983, the US had launched the shuttle program, with astronauts orbiting Earth and visiting the International Space Station. The space race was over, and global cooperation was the new trend. With the end of Apollo came the end of the frenzied excitement that glued the world to television screens in every country. I joined NASA two weeks before Sally Ride’s historic flight, STS-7, which ushered in a new climate of gender equality at the agency.

I'm extremely happy with both presentations at ISDC 2024, and thrilled to have the recorded versions to post on YouTube, to document this momentous occasion in space history. I was consistently surprised to discover, and then validate, that no one beat us to it. It seems so obvious and simple, and I still can't understand how it could possibly be true. As far back as the invention of the telescope in the early 1600s, the Jesuit astronomers could have made some primitive maps showing routes between the lunar landforms.

Not all space-related topics demand a full half-hour to explain, and some emerging ideas at the ISDC are simply so innovative and unique that they have not yet been fully explored and developed. The Launch Pad Talks are home to some of the most exciting ideas in space exploration, development, and settlement, by some of the newest voices in the field, all in the span of seven minutes!

Imagine a sinuous sulcus of rover tracks on the Moon from the standpoint of Homo planetarius, an advanced human species, a million years from now. On the lunar surface, where no wind or atmosphere erases the past, they will stand as enduring relics - symbols of immortality. Much like the Mayan or Egyptian pyramids, they will whisper of the mystery and mastery of an ancient, space-faring civilization. Earth will be unrecognizable then, with most of our architectural structures demolished, but the planetary roads will remain unchanged. There will be only one system of lunar roads but many more lunar missions over the next 1000 millennia. How often do we get the opportunity to design and build something that will still be intact millennia later? These are the first roads in space.

Although charting the planetary roadmaps is not frontier tech, designing rovers to lay down a network of roads on the Moon and Mars isn’t currently practical. The issue is the speed of the autonomous rovers, which are quite slow due to the need to communicate with Earth. GMV is one of the first companies to explore the issue of rapid rovers, via the European Space Agency’s GSTP program.

Do you have an interest in making digital maps of the planets? If so, the two biggest software competitors today are Esri’s ArcGIS, a proprietary solution, and Quantum GIS, an open-source solution. Although both can do most of anything you would need for a planetary project, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, depending on what you want to accomplish.

In the June 2023 Astrogator, I contributed an article that discussed the software options for creating a digital map of the Moon and Mars. I mentioned a system of planetary addresses based on low slope routes and quadrangles. One additional consideration is the creation of nomenclature guidelines to help inform the names of the newly charted planetary roads. We have a historical precedent in the creation of the first lunar map with named features by Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi in 1651, about 50 years after the invention of the telescope.

How many miles of planetary roads would we need on the Moon and Mars? I’ve estimated ~190K miles of roads on the Moon and ~280K miles on Mars. On Earth, roadbotics companies provide a service to governments around the world to objectively manage their road networks using artificial intelligence. In space, roadbotics might include autonomous rovers that are better, faster and cheaper with only one purpose: to leave their tracks for future explorers. Some of the Mars rovers leave their names in the tracks. In the image above, holes in Curiosity’s tire treads spell out JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Morse code.

Much more in the style of East Egg restraint than West Egg excess, in 2017, the Maui Baldwins put their house at the top of Olinda Road up for sale, and two years later, in March 2019, it sold for $3.1M. In January 2021, the copyright expired on The Great Gatsby, opening the door to many more adaptations, sequels and prequels. Let’s take a walk further down memory lane to the roaring 20s, and visit Gatsby’s estate in West Egg.

I spent the pandemic in Carmel Valley, walking distance to Del Mar, one of the most spectacular beaches in San Diego. It was during the lockdown that I finally found the time to transcribe my father’s stories, mostly typewritten, with comments handwritten in red and green pencil by Joseph Heller. It was a well-timed experience, as I was feeling lost and adrift in an environment that didn’t make much sense for me. It was a grounding experience, and wonderful to hear his voice again after so many years.

Dave Ellas was also a character in a story called Ono. Ono was completely handwritten, whereas the other stories were typed. Comments from Joseph Heller were written in green and red pencil in the margins of some of the stories, but there were no comments on Ono. My best guess is that the story was written while my father was a student in Dr. Christie's class, who took over teaching English Composition after Heller started writing Catch-18 in 1953.

The year was 1952 and Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in November, beating Governor Adlai Stevenson. My father, David Eskey, was a student at Penn State at the time, learning to write fiction from his English Composition teacher, Joseph Heller. Heller would later go on to write Catch-22.. Heller had by then introduced my father to his literary agent, Elizabeth McKee. Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth McKee had started their own agency, and had advised my father to keep working on his stories, which showed promise, but were still too "fragmentary" to be marketable, in their estimation. The Madams McIntosh and McKee represented the likes of Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, John Steinbeck, and Edna O’Brien, so Heller and my father were in very good company.