CHERIE BEASLEY is a science and technology writer who covers the engineering of living off Earth. Before turning to full-time writing, she spent a decade in municipal water system design, working on drought-resilience projects across the American Southwest—experience that convinced her that keeping a city hydrated and keeping a Mars colony alive are, at their core, the same kind of humble daily fight: pipes, pumps, scarcity, and the people who refuse to let either one run dry.
Her journalism has appeared in *IEEE Spectrum*, *Scientific American*, *Wired*, and *SpaceNews*, where she has reported on in-situ resource utilization, closed-loop life support research, and the decades-long effort to map the water hidden beneath the Martian surface. As a volunteer with water-technology outreach programs, she has helped bring recycling and conservation lessons from spaceflight engineering into classrooms and community utilities.
She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where the book's lessons about scarcity, reuse, and careful allocation inform everything from her rain barrels to her garden. *The Mars Colony Water Crisis* is her first book.