“The Bay Area includes some people who are really interested in the moon, and they helped me with [Red Moon]. In the first scene there’s a landing on the moon where their shuttle touches down while going something like 8,000 miles an hour – this is like a launch rail take-off, but in reverse. That was their idea. I never would have thought of that, because you have to hit the rail with just a couple centimeters tolerance for error. They told me that in a vacuum that wouldn’t be hard, and I thought, ‘Whoa. That would be one scary landing.’ It made for a fun way to start.”
— from Kim Stanley Robinson: The Good Anthropocene, an interview in Locus
The Adelaide Fan Review 