Penn State Beaver will host The Asia Project, a spoken word poetry event, at noon Oct. 17 in the Student Union Building auditorium. Poet Asia Samson will offer a blend of humor, inspiration and reflections on daily life in his poetry while accompanied by music provided by his brother-in-law Jollan Aurelio. Samson has appeared on HBO's "Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry" and Black Family Channel's "Spoken" and has performed with Dead Prez, Mos Def and DMX.

According to Robert Zubrin, president of the engineering firm Pioneer Astronautics and founder and president of the Mars Society, NASA's current vision of sending humans to the red planet depends on a 1,000-ton, 100-meter-long spacecraft. Too heavy to launch through Earth's atmosphere, the ship would have to be “built on orbit,” said Zubrin, at an estimated cost of $400 billion. He characterized it as “a giant interplanetary spaceship” engineered by “a giant space agency.”