Les Johnson

Les Johnson is an American physicist and science-fiction author who works at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, where he has served as principal investigator on advanced propulsion missions including the Solar Cruiser solar-sail demonstration. He co-writes hard science-fiction novels grounded in real spaceflight physics, including the Saving Proxima / Crisis at Proxima sequence and the Outer Planets Trilogy (The Grand Tour), often in collaboration with other genre authors, and has also written standalone SF such as Pluto. Alongside his fiction, Johnson has written and edited nonfiction on interstellar travel and propulsion concepts, including Going Interstellar, applying his real-world aerospace research to speculative but scientifically grounded futures.