Goodreads asked Michael Siemsen:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Michael Siemsen To thoroughly answer this for Exigency would be spoilerific, but I'll say that the initial spark came from reading results data from a survey a couple years ago. It may have been NASA asking. The question was: "Would you volunteer to go colonize Mars, with the understanding that it would be a one-way trip, and no possibility of a return to Earth?"
7 percent answered with an emphatic yes. 26% said they'd consider it. I went with this idea that if one-way trips are on the table, then an even more distant destination, light years away to one of the many Earth-like planets we keep finding, would not be so far fetched.

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