Archive for the ‘Space Book Reviews’ Category
Author: 
October 2nd, 2024
The American Foreign Policy Council Space Policy Initiative co-directors have designed a series of workshops to examine near-term scenarios that could have a significant psychological impact on public perceptions of space, and thus on resourcing and policy.
The report, REACTING TO MAJOR SPACE EVENTS ON THE MOON AND IN CISLUNAR SPACE —After Action Report— asks what do we want space to look like? What policies are necessary to get there?
Image credit: American Foreign Policy Council
Among futuristic scenarios, the report addresses what if China’s lunar factory crushes U.S. ambitions?; Can a private company claim the Moon?; Are China’s Moon safety zones a massive lunar land grab?
For access to the report, go to:
https://www.afpc.org/uploads/documents/Workshop_2_-_After_Action_Report_-_9.16.24.pdf
Posted in 
Meld the passion of a leading astrobiologist with the weighty nature of trying to grasp for answers to two key questions: Are we alone in the universe? How did life on Earth begin in the first place?
“The missions are telling us that the stuff we’re made of is not an accident. It’s almost common out there,” explains Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute.
Cabrol’s book, The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life (Scribner/Simon & Schuster), recently released, offers an insightful, and reflective view of the search for life – a mind-stretching quest not only looking “out there” but also right here on our home planet.
The observer and the observation
Perhaps part of the challenge is that humankind is both the observer and the observation, Cabrol explains. That is, we are life trying to understand itself and its origin.
“We are reminded that the universe is both an enigmatic puzzle and a profound mirror reflecting out own existence,” Cabrol writes.
Nathalie Cabrol is a French American explorer and the director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. In an exclusive interview, Space.com discussed with her the new book and the professional odyssey that she has embarked upon.
To read my new Space.com interview with the renowned astrobiologist, go to – “‘We are close:’ SETI astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol on the search for life” – at:
https://www.space.com/seti-nathalie-cabrol-the-secret-life-of-the-universe
Wait-a-Minute!
Image credit: Barbara David
In a new Wait-a-Minute report, the prestigious National Academies has taken a hard look at the NASA of today and what’s ahead.
For a space agency that has been a leader in exploring our planet and other worlds, it is in a world of hurt, the report suggests.
Sign of the crossroad.
The report identifies out-of-date infrastructure, pressures to prioritize short-term objectives, budget mismatches, inefficient management practices, and nonstrategic reliance on commercial partners as the core issues.
That said, the report explains that NASA should rebalance its priorities and increase investments in its facilities, expert workforce, and development of cutting-edge technology, “even if it means forestalling initiation of new missions.”
As noted in an Academies press statement, “NASA’s portfolio is based on accomplishing things that have never been done before, but the environment in which the agency functions is complicated by several factors,” including:
- Rapid advancements in technology
- The need to compete for talent with the commercial space sector, other space agencies, and other high-tech sectors
- A declining federal discretionary budget and a flat agency budget (in terms of purchasing power)
- Lack of timely congressional authorization acts
- Shortfalls in the nation’s pre-K-12 education system
- Increasing competition in space from China
Astronauts explore lunar south pole crater. A water ice-rich resource ready for processing awaits?
Credit: NASA
Core findings
The committee offers seven “core findings” that, in its view, rise to the highest level of priority. They are:
Core Finding 1: NASA’s ability to pursue high-risk, long-lead science and technology challenges and opportunities in aeronautics, space science, Earth science, and space operations and exploration has arguably been the agency’s greatest value to the nation. Pursuit of such potentially transformative opportunities requires constancy of purpose, consistent long-term funding commensurate with the tasks it has been asked to undertake, a technically skilled workforce able to devote sustained effort to address challenging problems, and leading-edge equipment and supporting infrastructure that enable work at the cutting edge of science and engineering.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Core Finding 2: NASA faces internal and external pressures to prioritize short-term measures without adequate consideration of longer-term needs and implications. This produces adverse impacts on contracting, budgeting, funding, infrastructure, R&D, and execution of NASA’s mission portfolio. If left unchecked, these pressures are likely to result in a NASA that is incapable of satisfying national objectives in the longer term.
Core Finding 3: NASA’s budget is often incompatible with the scope, complexity, and difficulty of its mission work. The long-term impacts of this mismatch include erosion of capabilities in workforce, critical infrastructure, and advanced technology development. The current relative allocations of funding to mission work as compared with that allocated to institutional support has degraded NASA’s capabilities to the point where agency sustainability is in question.
Image credit: NASA
Core Finding 4: NASA’s shift to milestone-based purchase-of-service contracts for first-of-a-kind, low-technology-readiness-level mission work can, if misused, erode the agency’s in-house capabilities, degrade the agency’s ability to provide creative and experienced insight and oversight of programs, and put the agency and the United States at increased risk of program failure.
Core Finding 5: Mission effectiveness across NASA is compromised by slow and cumbersome business operations that have been a consequence of legitimate efforts to increase efficiency and better coordinate complex tasks.
Artemis 2 crewmembers will cruise by the Moon during their mission, an eye-encounter of the lunar kind.
Image credit: NASA/Kennedy Space Center
Core Finding 6: Over the past decade, significant responsibilities and authorities for major programs previously delegated to the NASA center level have been shifting to the mission directorates. This may have potentially compromised checks and balances for a clear and independent technical oversight. While the optimum allocation of checks and balances can depend on the needs of a particular organization and mission, incorrectly establishing this balance can have extreme impacts.
To read the full and troublesome report — NASA at a Crossroads: Maintaining Workforce, Infrastructure, and Technology Preeminence in the Coming Decades – go to:
Wait a Minute!
Image credit: Barbara David
Book Review: Still As Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow by Christopher Cokinos; Pegasus Books; 2024; Hardcover, 448 pages; $32.00.
From the moment you open the cover of this volume, the reader is literally moonbound.
Author Cokinos has written a suburb book about our nightlight in the sky, Earth’s celestial partner, the Moon. His early eyepiece fascination with the Moon, dashing across the rugged lunar landscape via a three-inch reflector telescope stuck with him – and the reader is forever enriched thanks to that early attraction.
This book is true treasure thanks to his tasty style of poetic and philosophic prose and, as he observes that the Moon is more than a rock. It’s a story. Within the 13 chapters, you’ll find a rich tapestry of space exploration events that has captured – sometimes failing – to tell us the true story of our Moon.
The blend of Space Race anecdotes with the allure of our Moon that still propels our exploration instincts is skillfully told, underscoring humankind’s attributes, albeit sometimes also demonstrating our shortcomings.
“When I look at the Moon I see a scumble of violence and change that I register as terrain and that my mind knows is time,” the author writes. Elsewhere in the book you’ll find Cokinos grappling with the UN Outer Space Treaty, who owns the Moon debates, protecting cultural heritage sites on the Moon, and as he points out: “So if the Moon belongs to us, it means the first thing we do is talk with the lawyers.”
By completing this honest, witty and wondrous read, it’s a given you’ll never look at the Moon the same way again. “The Moon has proven to be a patient teacher,” Cokinos explains.
So grab this book and let’s all be students of the unknown together.
Image credit: The Planetary Society/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Christopher Cokinos is a Professor, Emeritus of English at the University of Arizona and is the author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, as well as Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. His articles, poems and essays about space and astronomy have been published in Sky & Telescope, the Los Angeles Times, has been featured in other venues, including NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
I want to spotlight a recent interview with Cokinos about this brilliant book. Take a view of “Talking with author Chris Cokinos about STILL AS BRIGHT” – a video from The Planetary Society’s Book Club, hosted by the firm-footed, but out of this world interviewer, Mat Kaplan, at:
https://www.planetary.org/video/talking-with-author-chris-cokinos
For more information on this book, go to:
http://www.pegasusbooks.com/books/still-as-bright-9781639365692-hardcover
A newly released report details the outcomes from potential near-term space-related scenarios that could significantly impact U.S. public perception, resourcing, and policy.
Image credit: OpenAI’s DALL·E.
The series of high-stakes, seminar-style wargames is designed to prepare U.S. leaders for possible space occurrences over the next two to three decades.
The simulations focused on scenarios that might plausibly confront the United States within the next two administrations.
A number of the scenarios were direct challenges by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to U.S. leadership in space.
Image credit: AFPC
Space scenarios
Reacting to Major Space Events at or Below Geostationary Orbit is a report of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC). The organization is “dedicated to bringing information to those who make or influence the foreign policy of the United States.”
Image credit: OpenAI’s DALL·E.
Scenario 1: Incident in the Cosmos — The Downing of a U.S. Satellite
Scenario 2: The Red Celestial Guard—PRC’s Co-orbital ASAT Constellation
Scenario 3: Orbital Tensions—Satellite Sabotage Showdown
Scenario 4: Celestial Vanguard—PLA’s Spaceplane Squadron Emergence
Scenario 5: Solar Sentinel—PRC’s Leap in Space-Based Power
Scenario 6: Celestial Core—PRC’s First Space Nuclear Reactor
Image credit: OpenAI’s DALL·E.
Strategic recommendations
The report offers strategic recommendations, such as the need to invest in critical technologies for maintaining and accelerating U.S. space leadership.
How best to prioritize space nuclear power and propulsion, space-based solar power satellites, and spaceplanes?
For the full report – Reacting to Major Space Events at or Below Geostationary Orbit — go to:
https://www.afpc.org/uploads/documents/Workshop_1_-_After_Action_Report_-_6.20.24.pdf
Book Review: After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon by Greg Eghigian; Oxford University Press, 2024; Hardcover, 400 pages; $29.99.
In this highly embraced volume the author explores how individuals, scientists, governments and the media responded to reports of UFO sightings and alien abductions, and what those responses say about the human experience.
Eghigian expertly tells this compelling tale via eight chapters, such as “Spaceships, Conspiracies, and the Birth of the UFO Detective, 1948-1953,” “Science and UFOs in the 1960s,” with a concluding segment “Where To, Where From, Wherefore?”
Image credit: Penn State/Inside Outer Space screengrab
“The UFO phenomenon essentially has been asking us to think of ourselves historically: what has been our past, what is going on right now, and what does the future hold?,” Eghigian writes. “The last question is one that has haunted the flying saucer mystery from the very beginning, and it was one that was acutely pressing during the Cold War.”
This book is a valuable contribution to unraveling (maybe snarl your mind more) the countless questions that swirl around UFOs, aliens from afar, and the significance of taking the time, pondering the plausible and implausible, and coming up with your own conclusions.
For an informative overview of the book, go to this article by Francisco Tutella at:
Also, go to this video featuring the author, Greg Eghigian, as he details why he wrote this book and his feelings about the intriguing, perplexing world of UFOs in the past, the present, and what the future portends at:
Who Owns the Moon? – In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space by A.C. Grayling; Oneworld Publications/distributed by Simon & Schuster (2024); Hardcover, 224 pages; $26.95.
Multiple countries have the Moon within its cross-hairs, for scientific purposes, for industrial gain, as well as to salute its military usefulness. Of late, China has put into action a lunar agenda that includes outreach to the Moon, planting taikonaut footprints there in the time-aged, dusty topside.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Artemis project also aims to “reboot” the Moon in a few years time.
So not only is this book timely reading – it’s a must-read. As the world’s superpowers and corporations jostle for control in space, it asks: who really can claim ownership of that world?
“To answer this question we have to look at some highly relevant precedents,” the author writes, as this is the aim of the volume.
Grayling is the founder and principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and its Professor of Philosophy.
Within its pages, the key chapters discuss the global commons, Antarctic protection, the high seas and deep oceans, as well as tackling a major issue of the day: Is the United Nations Outer Space Treaty “good enough” or ripe for an overhaul?
A space spinoff for discussion is addressed in this volume. That is, is there something available to humankind that is more powerful than partisan self-interest, be it profit motive, diplomatic power and national prestige?
The book concludes with a section, “what will happen…what can be done?” Grayling writes that the answer will take maturity, wisdom – “neither of which has evolved to a sufficient degree so far,” but there are some encouraging signs.
The book has a handy bibliography and very healthy section of notes for the reader to pursue.
Grayling makes the case for a new global consensus, one that recognizes the rights of everyone who lives on this planet, but also longingly looks at the Moon and ponders how it fits into our 21st century landscape of posturing politics, resource requirements, and whether the Moon is an extension of human conflict.
For more information on this timely book, go to:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Who-Owns-the-Moon/A-C-Grayling/9780861547258
Who Owns Outer Space? – International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space by Michael Byers and Aaron Boley; Cambridge University Press/Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law (2023); 428 pages; Available by Open Access.
This highly acclaimed book melds space activities, international law, and global governance to underscore major, now-looming, environmental, safety, and security challenges now on full-boil.
Authors Byers and Boley are from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and this incredibly rich, information-packed book should give the reader pause in how to grapple with perplexing issues of today. The volume offers proposed “actionable solutions” to those challenges.
“Social scientists and lawyers are needed to ensure that solutions are politically feasible, and to carry them forward into lasting rules and institutions. Engineers are needed to develop technologies that can be used in beneficial ways, with environmental scientists guiding us forward by identifying what is beneficial, and what might not be,” they write in the volume’s introduction.
The book is divided into 9 solid chapters: Space Tourism, Mega-constellations, Mega-constellations and International Law, Abandoned Rocket Bodies, as well as sections on Space Mining, Planetary Defense, Space Security, Anti-satellite Weapons and International Law, and ending with a conclusion chapter – Where to from Here?
Credit: DARPA/DSO
That’s a diverse suite of subject topics. But this very readable, fully-referenced book launches a warning flare that space activities of today and tomorrow can be endangered, and just how those undertakings — and space itself — should be sustainably governed.
Who Owns Outer Space? – International Law, Astrophysics, and the Sustainable Development of Space reviews existing international treaties and state practices, but also details limitations in those treaties and practices.
Ideally, by strengthening those elements the hope is to short-circuit calamitous incidents. “War in space has no good outcomes,” they write, while observing that “long-term solutions to grand challenges in space require approaches that integrate multiple disciplines.”
On May 8 of this year, this book won the prestigious 2023 Donner Prize.
Go to this video capturing the views of Byers and Boley at:
For more information about this book, and to gain free access to its contents, go to:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/who-owns-outer-space/960CCB0464744F845B09434D932699EC
From the Garage to Mars: Memoir of a Space Entrepreneur by Scott Tibbitts; HenschelHAUS Publishing (March 2024); 254 pages; softcover; $24.95.
If you’ve got entrepreneurial dollars aligned with the needed spunk and spine to create a new space company, this book provides an insider, industrial strength look at what kind of roller coaster ride you may encounter.
The author founded Starsys Research Corporation of Boulder, Colorado, an innovative business that, quite literally, had wax flowing through its veins. Starsys pioneered thermal “actuator” technology and mechanical systems for spacecraft – critical items that open, close, deploy, and move components on spacecraft, like opening lens caps.
Such devices can make or break a mission, be it in Earth orbit or crossing the intervening void to reach Mars, Saturn, and elsewhere.
Tibbitts candid and sleep-stealing worries included confronting this self-imagined and calamitous news headline:
“Space Motor Made by Small Space Company in Boulder, Colorado Fails. Billion Dollar NASA Mission Lost. CEO/Entrepreneur Scott Tibbitts says: “I’m stumped…it seemed to be working just fine before we put it on the rocket.”
When NASA’s Spirit rover plopped down on the Red Planet back in 2004, the first pictures transmitted back to Earth included the Starsys logo; the small company had built 27 motors powering the mini-rover and its instruments. “The best product placement ever,” recalls Tibbitts, “one of the coolest things our team ever did.”
While getting to Mars was a company high point, the Starsys track record over a span of 20 years built more than 4,000 devices that flew on 350 spacecraft. As Tibbitts explains, the firm’s success was anchored in a corporate culture that emphasized technical competence bolstered by emphasis on fun and family, team building, and having an easily accessible “Gripe Box” for employees.
In tell-it-like-it-was fashion, the volume is peppered with “Tibbitts Tips,” from the power of play, protecting the price, and the value of 3-day weekends to stop doing what you suck at and let go or be dragged.
In the building of a space company from scratch, the author details both the highs and lows endured, with one chapter bluntly titled: “Entrepreneurial Hell.”
Starsys was acquired by SpaceDev in 2006 with Tibbitts poignantly writing about the angst incurred in “giving up the company I had invested 20 years of my life to create.” SpaceDev was renamed Sierra Nevada Space Systems after a subsequent acquisition in 2008.
This book is well-written, giving the reader a full monty memoir of living on the edge of success to personal upheavals, dealing with tragic and soul-searching events, and what lessons learned were uncovered along the long, winding road.
“I had no idea that seven dollars in hardware-store parts, some wax, and a certainty that, ‘this is so cool. There has to be some use for it…’ would lead to my three-decade journey,” Tibbitts concludes, “which is far from over.”
In short, wax aside, the author himself became an “actuator” and this volume underscores that fact.
For more information on this book, go to:
https://henschelhausbooks.com/product/from-the-garage-to-mars-memoir-of-a-space-entrepreneur/
Book Review: Space and the Warfighter – How Space Technologies Transformed U.S. Military Actions; Spacehistory101.com Press (2023); 232 pages; softcover; $28.97.
I recently returned from the Space Foundation’s mega-symposium in Colorado Springs, a meeting that highlighted U.S. military space prowess and issues of warfighting.
The reader will greatly benefit by taking a read of this informative volume, one that takes you into the history, background, and evolving U.S. Air Force thinking regarding military conflict in space.
Anchored primarily in past military operations, such as Desert Shield and Desert Shield, and noting the formation of the U.S. Space Force, the book features contributions by leading military historians.
Space has become a vital part of the national defense plan of the United States. The message is that use of space systems for warfare in the past was not as understood, nor appreciated as they are today. Desert Storm did involve the full arsenal of military space systems – the first large-scale integration of space systems in support of warfighting.
This book not only underscores the history of utilizing space for military means, but also the progression and organization of space doctrine and policy.
Image credit: U.S. Air Force/SSgt Vanessa Valentine
I was particularly drawn to what influence the 9/11 attacks in September 2001 had on the application of space systems and also the need for security of those assets. To this point, protection of launch facilities, including at that time space shuttle operations like the mission of STS-108. That flight of Endeavor was the first space shuttle launch following the September 11 attacks.
Space and the Warfighter spotlights military need for early warning, communications, satellite-gleaned weather data, as well as positioning, navigation and timing capabilities. For instance, roughly 100 satellites supported military operations in Afghanistan and the surrounding region; use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) has become omnipresent over time.
In an afterwords section, this fact is flagged: “The two Gulf Wars, and the decade separating them, generated and demonstrated a revolutionary transformation in American warfighting – a transformation in which space-based communications and [Positioning, Navigation and Timing] PNT, among other systems, used capabilities originally conceived and developed for strategic purposes to support theater or tactical operations.”
This has fundamentally changed, the book continues, with the U.S. military now relying heavily on orbiting space systems “in an increasingly congested and contested domain.”
For more information on this book, under the SPACE 3.0 Foundation, go to:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_30%3ASpacehistory101.com+Press
