David S. F. Portree is the author of the Romance to Reality website, a project to make widely available Moon/Mars expedition-and-settlement concepts developed since 1950. His site has led to invitations to write articles from Air & Space Smithsonian, Astronomy, and other magazines, as well as a commission to write Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950-2000 (NASA SP-2001-4521), published by NASA Headquarters in February 2001.
David earned a Master's degree in History in 1987, worked in planetariums for five years while developing his writing craft, then went to work at NASA's Johnson Space Center as Senior Technical Writer. He also maintained the Center's history function. He became a full-time freelance science writer in 1995.
His other books include Mir Hardware Heritage (NASA RP-1357, March 1995) and Walking to Olympus: An EVA Chronology (NASA Monographs in Aerospace History #7, October 1997), the latter written with NASA EVA engineer Robert Trevino.
Besides Romance to Reality, David's current projects include earning a Ph.D. in History, researching a website on robotic solar system exploration (debut set for August 2002), and teaching the public about astronomy at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
He lives in Flagstaff with his wife Martha and his pug dog Marvin (the Martian).