Archive for the ‘Space Book Reviews’ Category
Author: 
May 12th, 2024
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
Posted in 
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
The Music of Space: Scoring the Cosmos in Film and Television by Chris Carberry; McFarland Books (2024); 307 pages; Softcover: $39.95.
Music to my ears…that somebody has written an account of the music of space-aged movies and television, as well as about off-Earth performances!
This well-researched and thoughtful book underscores the role of music in such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and one of my all-time favorites, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Chris Carberry, CEO of the non-profit organization Explore Mars, Inc., has written an informative account regarding the use of film scores that play a transformative role in how we perceive space. “Music has the capacity to capture and articulate the human experience and emotions than can be expressed in words,” he explains.
The Music of Space is divided into 12 sections, with an impressive chapter notes and excellent bibliography.
Covered in its pages, the book kicks-off with the first 50 years of space films, from silence to sound, through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that saw a turning point in space music thanks to composer John Williams and his Star Wars contributions. Highlighted too is the space horror classic, Alien, the return of Star Trek, and into the 1980s, anchored by Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial. You will also find his discussion of The Martian, Interstellar, and a number of space-based television epics.
ISS Astronaut, Chris Hadfield, picks out David Bowie’s Space Oddity.
Image credit: NASA
Carberry doesn’t skimp on details, showcasing his matchless research skills.
Near the book’s concluding remarks, the reader will find a nicely explained section on music in “real” space, be it played via harmonicas, guitars, keyboard, flutes, bells, saxophones, even a didgeridoo. Similarly, music in other forms is included, from the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” broadcast toward the star Polaris to Apollo 17 moonwalkers singing a takeoff of “While Strolling Through the Park.”
I was drawn in by this author comment: “As the pace of real space activities accelerates, it is likely that space-related content will continue. However, the sound of space will also inevitably change,” he writes, “as these stories become less and less the realm of science fiction, and reflect reality.”
The Music of Space is an exceptional treasure on a topic that needed notice – and in chronicling this subject matter, Carberry has struck the right chord.
For more information on this book, go to:
The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System by Dante S. Lauretta; Grand Central Publishing & Hachette Book Group (2024); 336 pages; Hardcover: $30.00
It is not often that a 21st century author is a milestone-making participant that digs billions of years into the past to further the future.
Dante Lauretta is a cosmic “rock hound.” And this book is far from being a tell-all tale of his stellar leadership in the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer mission, mercifully shortened to OSIRIS-REx.
The Asteroid Hunter is a story of his personal quest in shaping a remarkable scientific career. This very enjoyable, insightful and moving volume is must reading for all that hunger to understand the rough and tumble cosmos at large – along with the delicate nature and audacity of human spirit necessary to tangle with the unknown.
Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-REx reached asteroid Bennu in September 1999, then performed snag, stash, and send-off maneuvers, express delivering those space rock specimens to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023.
Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx’s principal investigator from the University of Arizona holds a mock up of the asteroid collection device – TAGSAM.
Image credit: Barbara David
OSIRIS-REx released its capsule of extraterrestrial goodies over Earth’s atmosphere. That container then parachuted into the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range as the OSIRIS-REx team – and the author — was on location to welcome it home.
That voyage to asteroid Bennu and back to our planet took seven years. OSIRIS-REx was the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and deliver it to Earth. And that space trek alone – proposing, building, and flying the craft — is a tale in itself.
Starting in 2011, Lauretta served as the principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. But he offers so much more in this well-written, cleaver and personal prose of a story.
A reader will find his professional and personal memoir instructive. Indeed, as Lauretta notes “the universe is our classroom, our laboratory, our muse” and that “our journey of exploration has only just begun.”
For more information on this remarkable book, go to:
BTW: go to the Amazon offerings to hear the author read a section of the book at:
https://www.amazon.com/Asteroid-Hunter-Scientists-Journey-System/dp/1538722941
Book Review: Off-Earth Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space by Erika Nesvold; MIT Press (2023); 304 pages, Hardcover: $27.95
This is a thought-provoking, even controversial for some readers!
Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist, has worked as a researcher at NASA Goddard and the Carnegie Institution for Science.
As a developer for Universe Sandbox as well as cofounder of the nonprofit organization the JustSpace Alliance, Nesvold is also the creator and host of the podcast Making New Worlds.
The book rests on a stated premise: Can we do better in space than we’ve done here on Earth?
An issue is that we don’t, shouldn’t, or can’t leave our ethics back here on home planet Earth.
As stated by the publisher, Off-Earth includes historical and contemporary examples from outside the “dominant Western/US…and privileged narrative of the space industry.”
What that translates into is the author’s narrative on the potential ethical pitfalls of becoming a multi-planet species.
Bottom line: We won’t be departing our earthly problems and start afresh – even by taking in that space suit, airlock and cramped habitat smell.
Here’s an extract from the book, courtesy of MIT Press titled “The Thorny Ethics of Planetary Engineering – Whenever someone waxes poetic about terraforming alien worlds, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the ethical implications of the proposal.”
Go to:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-thorny-ethics-of-planetary-engineering/
For more information about this book, go to:
Image credit: Lightroom
A new show has opened at London’s Lightroom that offers a unique new perspective on humankind’s past and future voyages to the Moon.
The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks is a collaboration between the movie actor, Chris Riley (writing), Andy Saunders (Apollo Remastered imagery), Anne Nikitin (music) and 59 Productions.
The world premier took place on December 5 in London, a work that tells the stories of the Apollo missions in intimate detail. Joining Hanks at the premiere, the three-person Artemis II crew.
Image credit: Lightroom
Powerful projection
The Moonwalkers also provides an insight into the impending return of crewed surface missions by going behind-the-scenes of the Artemis program, including interviews between Tom Hanks and Artemis astronauts.
Lightroom’s powerful projection and audio technology transforms the immense space into a vehicle for a spectacular immersive voyage to our closest celestial neighbor – the Moon.
Image credit: Lightroom
The Moonwalkers is a combination of storytelling by Tom Hanks, co-written by Chris Riley, along with a splendid score from Anne Nikitin, and visuals from the seminal book by Andy Saunders: Apollo Remastered.
Images are projected at huge scale at Lightroom, London. The 800-speaker system pulsates during the Saturn V launch sequence. Once at the Moon, panoramic images envelop the viewer.
For more information, go to this sites:
https://lightroom.uk/whats-on/the-moonwalkers/
https://youtu.be/M7No_LSfeQM?si=IEghRVMpz2-umVTK
https://youtu.be/ZgdLYHsNNmU?si=SnJnD4t007OLwBdi
Original NASA footage and breath-taking images from Andy Saunders’ Apollo Remastered.
Image credit: Black Dog & Leventhal
Book Review: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson; Simon & Schuster (2023); 688 pages, Hardcover: $35.00
I can’t help but start this book review without making note of this recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDrTMnm1IE
Walter Isaacson has done us all a favor by exploring a work in progress, the persona of Elon Musk.
In story sleuthing fashion, the author followed Musk for two years, interviewing not only the subject matter at hand and up-close, but family members, coworkers, friends – and “foe-fighters” too.
As explained on the book jacket, this volume ponders a key question: “are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?”
Musk has previously characterized himself as not a “chill, normal dude.”
Isaacson paints that picture too, but also spotlights the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like temper and other atmospherics that drives the ambitious hunger of Musk to not only challenge and change our world but also eye renovation of the Red Planet.
Starship
Image credit: Elon Musk/SpaceX
This volume is comprised of 95 segments, well-written slices of Musk’s past, be it PayPal, Tesla, artificial intelligence, Twitter, underground boring, ex-wives to the sky-high Starlink constellation and his risk-taking reach for escape velocity via the SpaceX’s Falcon booster series and Starship.
Isaacson is a masterful writer. This book, like the author’s portraits of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Einstein, is absolutely first-rate.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Isaacson reports that Musk “did not ask to, nor did he, read this book before it was published, and he exercised no control over it.” Thank God and/or Musk’s lawyers.
So enough said…and start reading this book knowing full-well Elon Musk is a work in progress, arguably a person wearing a customized sandwich board: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”
Image credit: Columbia Records
To prove that point, take a look at this PBS Frontline documentary:
“Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover” at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6z4H_geX5A
Also, go to this resource provided by the book publisher, Simon & Schuster:
“Elon Musk: The Ultimate Inside Story” at:
https://youtu.be/2fYSuoJINKM?si=sW0Sy_0XW8o-LBpI
And you’ll enjoy “Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin/Lex Fridman Podcast #395” at:
https://youtu.be/aGOV5R7M1Js?si=iGL5G4iHZ9Y3zhsF
For more information on this book, go to:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Elon-Musk/Walter-Isaacson/9781982181284
Interstellar – The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars by Avi Loeb; a Mariner imprint of HarperCollins Publishers (2023); 256 pages, Hardcover: $28.99.
Avi Loeb is a provocative Harvard astrophysicist and this expressive, articulate, witty book details his fervor for thought-provoking views about our neighbors beyond Earth.
The book’s introduction immediately draws a line in the sand and challenges the reader. “I am convinced that we are tantalizing close not only to learning that terrestrial life is not the only life in the Solar System, and that human civilization is not the only civilization to exist or have existed. I am also convinced that most of humanity is not ready.”
Professor Loeb also underscores a predicament. He says we’re closer to a “D-class” civilization, or one that is vigorously trashing our world, creating unsustainable conditions that are necessary to prolong life and our hold on this planet. We must learn to lean into science, he writes, to survive and strive. In doing so, humanity can attain an upward trajectory while stepping into humanity’s interstellar future.
The book’s goal is to make and keep you excited about that future, Loeb adds. And within the volume’s 10 diverse chapters, a reader receives healthy doses of enthusiasm about what’s ahead.
Image credit: Galileo Project/Avi Loeb
Loeb is the longest serving Chair of Harvard’s Astronomy Department. He also heads the Galileo Project, an endeavor to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of other star folk from “accidental or anecdotal observations and legends” to the mainstream of crystal-clear, confirmed and systematic scientific research.
In up-to-date prose, among the many themes, Loeb dives into Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP). I don’t want to set off a spoiler alert, but the author calls for reimagining first contact and offers eye-opening, speculative thoughts on that topic.
Interstellar – The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars is a mind-meld of philosophy, physics, and cutting-edge science. Loeb blueprints a radical approach to our search for ET – and how best to brace for the reality of what’s ahead.
In a closing part of the book, Loeb points out that you are not alone, but be aware, he notes that “not only are we not at the center of the cosmic stage, not only did we come late to the stage, but life as we know it among matter as we know it does not even represent most of the stuff that is presented on that stage.”
Be prepared to roam the Universe like never before. Do your utmost to grasp Loeb’s spirited and optimistic view of our cosmological destination as we ascend the ladder of civilizations.
For more information on this book, go to:
https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063250901/interstellar/
Updates on the Galileo Project and its on-going initiatives can be found at:
Immersive Mars Issue of Tech Briefs:
Mars: Past, Present, Future; NASA’s New, Resilient Approach to Moon, Mars Exploration; Robotic Exploration of Caves on Mars; Developing High–Fidelity Martian Regolith Simulants; Astronaut Smart Glove for Mars EVA Spacesuits; Earthly Twin Offers Test Bed for NASA’s Peserverance Mars Rover; and 3D–Printed Mars Habitat Simulated on Earth.
Go to:
https://www.nxtbook.com/smg/techbriefs/23TB07/index.php#/p/Intro
