Becoming Spacefarers

Author : James A. Vedda
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2012-06-21
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781477130933

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Becoming Spacefarers by James A. Vedda Pdf

What is a spacefaring society, and how do we get there from here? In addressing these questions, this book examines how partisanship and parochialism have hindered American space dreams in recent years, and demonstrates that the lessons we should have learned from U.S. history can put us on a more productive path. Instead of being stuck in Stage One space development (space as a training ground), we can move more quickly to Stage Two (Earth-Moon space as an industrial park) and eventually to Stage Three (human activity across the solar system). The keys to achieving this are routine proximity operations throughout Earth-Moon space, sustainable space infrastructure, and a new level of collaboration between the public and private sectors not adventure trips to distant solar system destinations. In Becoming Spacefarers: Rescuing Americas Space Program, James A. Vedda, one of the most innovative space policy analysts working today, offers a no-nonsense account of the current doldrums of spacefl ight in the United States and how the nation might deal with it. He makes clear that we are in a crisis, that business as usual will not enable us to overcome it, and that it is not suffi cient to rest on past successes or to accept the present partisanship and parochialism. In addition to diagnosing the problems, Vedda also offers useful and in some cases provocative prescriptions for how Americans might untie the Gordian knot of current approaches to spacefl ight.

Author : Umberto Cavallaro
Publisher : Springer
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9783319340487

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Women Spacefarers by Umberto Cavallaro Pdf

This book tells the fascinating stories of the valiant women who broke down barriers to join the space program. Beginning with the orbital flight of USSR cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, they became players in the greatest adventure of our time. The author contextualizes their accomplishments in light of the political and cultural climate, from the Cold War in the background to the changing status of women in society at large during the Seventies. The book includes the biographies of, and in some cases interviews with, the sixty women who flew in space in the first half century of space history. It reports their achievements and some little known details. The result is a gallery of pioneering women who reached for the stars: women who, with exceptional skill, hard work, and dedication, reached impressive careers as accomplished pilots, researchers, and engineers; many are now in high level managerial positions both at NASA or in public and private organizations, and all left a legacy of strength.

Author : Christopher Wanjek
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674984486

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Spacefarers by Christopher Wanjek Pdf

What will it take to make humanity a spacefaring species? The usual: good reasons and good planning. Christopher Wanjek explores the practical motivations for striking out into the far reaches of the solar system and the realities of the challenge. And he introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are already tackling that challenge.

Author : Everest Media,
Publisher : Everest Media LLC
Page : 39 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2022-07-22T22:59:00Z
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9798822547032

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Summary of Lori Garver's Escaping Gravity by Everest Media, Pdf

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I had a conversation with Barack Obama in 2008, when he was the Democratic presidential nominee, about NASA. I explained to him that the Shuttle was the most visible part of NASA, but its designated purpose had been to lower launch costs and make space travel routine. However, it had never come close to achieving this goal. #2 I had been attracted to a career at NASA that involved space because I saw infinite potential in it. I was a child of the 1960s who loved a challenge, and space seemed like the most meaningful challenge ahead. I was determined to make a difference. #3 The first disturbance in the force came when Senator Bill Nelson declined to schedule a meeting with us. The Florida Democrat's stated reasons were nebulous, and didn't involve me. I couldn't believe a single Democratic senator's personal views were enough to sideline the President's extremely well-qualified nominee. #4 The Bush administration had budgeted money for the Space Station, which would have been used to cover the funding shortfall of Constellation. The next president would have been tasked with adding several billion dollars a year to keep money flowing to Shuttle, Constellation, and Space Station contractors.

Author : James Clay Moltz
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2024-01-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780231556798

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Crowded Orbits by James Clay Moltz Pdf

Space has become increasingly crowded since the turn of the century, as a growing number of countries, companies, and even private citizens have begun operating satellites and become spacefarers. Crowded Orbits offers readers a valuable primer on space policy from an international perspective, examining technology, diplomacy, commerce, science, and military applications. This second edition is thoroughly updated to cover events of the decade following the book’s original publication in 2014, when the pace of the competition to exploit space has accelerated dramatically. James Clay Moltz examines the ongoing tension between competition and cooperation in space, tracing the geopolitical and policy consequences of key developments. Drawing on decades of experience, he considers possible avenues for collaboration among the growing number of actors as well as the forces driving potential space-related conflicts. Moltz examines the challenges to existing treaties and other governance mechanisms that have struggled to keep up with the spread of technology. He provides policy recommendations to enhance international collaboration, further scientific exploration, and restrain harmful military activities. This edition features analysis of a range of topics, including the ongoing commercialization of space by SpaceX, Planet, and other start-up companies; new capabilities to monitor Earth from space; renewed tensions between the United States and rivals China and Russia in military activities; and emerging multinational competition on the Moon.

Author : Sylvia Engdahl
Publisher : Sylvia Engdahl
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2019-11-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward by Sylvia Engdahl Pdf

Much has been said about the positive effect of the photos of Earth obtained by Apollo 8, which for the first time showed our planet as a globe, a fragile refuge amid barren surroundings, and thereby launched the environmental movement. The negative impact--the subconscious apprehension resulting from realization that space is an actual place containing little that's familiar to us and perhaps much that we'd rather not meet--is not spoken of. But it may be no less significant. Could this be one of the reasons why widespread interest in space died so soon after the first moon landing? For the past fifty years space advocates have been puzzled and frustrated by the slowness of progress in space and the failure of the public to grasp its importance not only to the future of humankind, but to the preservation of Earth's environment. But is it really cause for discouragement? In this book Sylvia Engdahl argues that in the light of history, it's not surprising that acceptance of a new outlook on the universe is slow. All past human advances have been made by visionary minorities without the support of their contemporaries, and our transformation into a spacefaring species will be no exception. This book also includes all of Engdahl's earlier essays about space, such as "Space and Human Survival," which has been popular on the Web for nearly twenty years, plus new ones about the priority of Mars and the question of whether we'll ever meet hostile aliens. In addition, an Epilogue contains the quotations from her Web page "Space Quotes to Ponder" about why a presence in space is vital to humankind. X-Ray is enabled and includes biographical information about all the quotation authors as well as the people mentioned in the essays.

Author : Sylvia Engdahl
Publisher : Sylvia Engdahl
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2012-06-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 9798985853278

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The Planet-Girded Suns: Our Forebears' Firm Belief in Inhabited Exoplanets by Sylvia Engdahl Pdf

Interest in exoplanets--the worlds of other stars--is not new. From the late 17th century until the end of the 19th, almost all educated people believed that the stars are suns surrounded by inhabited planets--a belief that was expressed not in science fiction, but in serious speculation, both scientific and religious, as well as in poetry. Only during the first half of the 20th century was it thought that life-bearing exoplanets are rare. This is not a science book--rather, it belongs to the category known as History of Ideas. First published by Atheneum in 1974, it tells the story of the rise, fall, and eventual renewal of widespread conviction that we are not alone in the universe. In this 2012 updated edition the chapters dealing with modern speculation have been revised to reflect the progress science has made during the past 40 years, including the actual detection of planets orbiting other stars. However, it is not intended to be more than a brief introduction to today's views; its focus is on little-known facts about those of the past. Why should we care what our forebears believed? Now, the question of ET life is a matter for investigation by science. Yet it's significant that most educated people of past centuries were convinced that other inhabited worlds exist, without any scientific evidence whatsoever. This historical fact reveals that human beings have an instinctive sense of kinship with the wider universe and a desire to see the realms that lie beyond this one small planet--and perhaps, eventually, to go there. Our ancestors conceived of such voyages only in a spiritual sense, as occurring after death. But we who have taken our first small steps into space are aware that our descendants may set foot on the worlds of other suns. Just as in the 17th century people were initially upset by the new knowledge that the stars are suns scattered in space rather than lights fixed to a nearby sphere, the growing awareness that Earth is not safely isolated from whatever lies beyond makes many of our contemporaries uneasy. Thus today's predominant feelings about spaceships are ambivalent. Nevertheless, if an impulse toward belief that we are not alone in the universe is indeed an innate characteristic of human beings, as the past spread of belief in inhabited exoplanets suggests, we can be sure that those who follow us will not turn back from becoming spacefarers.

Author : Martin Elvis
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2021-05-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780300231922

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Asteroids by Martin Elvis Pdf

A unique, wide-ranging examination of asteroid exploration and our future in space Human travel into space is an enormously expensive and unforgiving endeavor. So why go? In this accessible and authoritative book, astrophysicist Martin Elvis argues that the answer is asteroid exploration, for the strong motives of love, fear, and greed. Elvis's personal motivation is one of scientific love--asteroid investigations may teach us about the composition of the solar system and the origins of life. A more compelling reason may be fear--of a dinosaur killer-sized asteroid hitting our planet. Finally, Elvis maintains, we should consider greed: asteroids likely hold vast riches, such as large platinum deposits, and mining them could provide both a new industry and a funding source for bolder space exploration. Elvis explains how each motive can be satisfied, and how they help one another. From the origins of life, to "space billiards," and space sports, Elvis looks at how asteroids may be used in the not-so-distant future.

Author : Robert W. Phillips
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2011-10-09
Category : Science
ISBN : 1441968997

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Grappling with Gravity by Robert W. Phillips Pdf

Grappling with Gravity explores the physiological changes that will occur in humans and the plants and animals that accompany humans as we move to new worlds, be it to colony in the emptiness of space or settlements on the Moon, Mars, or other moons or planets. This book focuses on the biomedical aspects, while not ignoring other life-changing influences of space living. For example, what happens to people physiologically in the microgravity of space, where weight and the direction "up" become meaningless? Adapting to microgravity represents the greatest environmental challenge that life will have encountered since our ancestors moved from the seas to solid Earth. Away from Earth the human body will begin almost immediately to adapt and change, to be able to function in these strange environments. As a person adapts in space he or she will become less fit to live on Earth.

Author : Lori Garver
Publisher : Diversion Books
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2022-06-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781635767735

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Escaping Gravity by Lori Garver Pdf

A former NASA deputy administrator recounts how she battled greed and corruption to revolutionize the agency and usher in a new space age. Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver’s firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries overcame the political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency. The success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and countless other commercial space efforts were preceded by decades of work by a group of people Garver calls “space pirates.” Their quest to transform NASA put Garver in the crosshairs of Congress, the aerospace industry, and hero-astronauts trying to protect their own profits and mythology within a system that had held power since the 1950s. As the head of the NASA transition team for President-elect Barack Obama and second-in-command of the agency, Garver drove policies and funding that enabled commercial competition just as the capabilities and resources of the private sector began to mature. She was determined to deliver more valuable programs, which required breaking the self-interested space-industrial cycle that, like the military, preferred to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on programs aimed to sustain jobs and contracts in key congressional districts. The result: more efficiency and greater progress. Including insider NASA conversations and insights on how the US space industry has been transformed to become the envy of the world and is ushering in a new space age, Escaping Gravity offers a blueprint for how to drive productive and meaningful change. Praise for Escaping Gravity “Former NASA official Lori Garver offers a front-row seat to the decades-long struggles within and among space bureaucrats and space billionaires. Bring popcorn, as you bear witness to an untold slice of space history.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist and author of Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier “We are living at the most exciting time in space exploration since the Apollo era, in part because the world’s largest space agency, NASA, got around to trying something new, the funding of commercial crews. Lori Garver tells it like it is . . . or was for a woman effecting change at NASA despite men of the military industrial complex—and their cost-plus contracts. It wasn’t rocket science, it was much harder than that. Don’t take my word(s) for it; read this book.” —Bill Nye, CEO, The Planetary Society “A scathing memoir that shows the ugly side of NASA while offering hope for a better future for the space agency.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author : Bergita Ganse,Urs Ganse
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2020-08-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783662617021

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The Spacefarer's Handbook by Bergita Ganse,Urs Ganse Pdf

Now is the time to fly to space! New technological developments, commercialisation of spaceflight and advances in space medicine have made human space travel more attainable than ever before. This entertaining but nevertheless authoritative book gives a practical introduction to space travel from a number of viewpoints: How spacecraft are built, how to steer and navigate them, instructions for a comfortable everyday life in space and a guide to remain healthy and strong in weightlessness. The Spacefarer's Handbook is full of advice, tips and anecdotes to prepare the reader for their own trip to space. At the same time, it does not lose the scientific perspective on spaceflight. The authors, a physicist and a space medicine specialist, explain the underlying concepts rigorously and include recent research findings. From the operating principles of rocket engines, via bone loss in weightlessness to the methane lakes of Titan, this book contains everything aspiring spacefarers need to know! It also serves as a very good resource, beyond general space enthusiasts, for science fiction readers & writers who are looking for a better foundation in space flight. "Highly recommended for everyone who wants to fly to space and all passengers of our mothership Earth!" Hans Schlegel, ESA Astronaut

Author : Christopher Wanjek
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2020-04-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674247031

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Spacefarers by Christopher Wanjek Pdf

A Telegraph Best Science Book of the Year “A witty yet in-depth exploration of the prospects for human habitation beyond Earth...Spacefarers is accessible, authoritative, and in the end, inspiring.” —Richard Panek, author of The Trouble with Gravity It’s been over fifty years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So why is there so little human presence in space? Will we ever reach Mars? And what will it take to become a multiplanet species? While many books have speculated on the possibility of living beyond the Earth, few have delved into the practical challenges. A wry and compelling take on the who, how, and why of near-future colonies in space, Spacefarers introduces us to the engineers, scientists, planners, dreamers, and entrepreneurs who are striving right now to make life in space a reality. While private companies such as SpaceX are taking the lead and earning profits from human space activity, Christopher Wanjek is convinced this is only the beginning. From bone-whittling microgravity to eye-popping profits, the risks and rewards of space settlement have never been so close at hand. He predicts we will have hotels in low-earth orbit, mining and tourism on the Moon, and science bases on Mars—possibly followed (gravity permitting) by full blown settlements. “Nerdily engaging (and often funny)...Technology and science fiction enthusiasts will find much here to delight them, as Wanjek goes into rich detail on rocketry and propulsion methods, including skyhooks and railguns to fling things into orbit...He is a sensible skeptic, yet also convinced that, in the long run, our destiny is among the stars.” —The Guardian “If the events of this year have had you daydreaming about abandoning the planet entirely, [Spacefarers] is a geekily pleasurable survey of the practicalities and challenges.” —The Telegraph “The best book I’ve read on space exploration since Isaac Asimov.” —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic

Author : Pamela Sargent
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 1878 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781504054362

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The Venus Collection by Pamela Sargent Pdf

The Nebula Award–winning author’s “masterful SF trilogy” is a multigenerational epic of human colonists terraforming the second planet from the sun (Publishers Weekly). Often compared to Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy, the three novels gathered here comprise the complete Venus saga by the author of The Shore of Women, “one of the genre’s best writers” (The Washington Post). The Venus Project—making the planet’s atmosphere habitable for humans—spans centuries and determines the fates of multiple generations. Venus of Dreams: Iris Angharads, a determined, independent woman, sets herself one massive goal: to make the poison-filled atmosphere of Venus hospitable to humans. She works day and night to realize her dream, with only one person sharing her passion, Liang Chen. It seems impossible to make Venus, with its intolerable air and waterless environment, into a paradise, but Iris succeeds. And in doing so, she also creates a powerful dynasty, beginning with her first born, Benzi Liangharad. Venus of Shadows: The Venus Project calls upon the strongest and most courageous to create a prosperous world in the dismal wilderness of Venus. Those who demonstrate the skill and passion to embark on this adventure must transform the barren planet in the midst of political and cultural unrest. When Risa and Benzi, children of Iris, find themselves in opposing forces on the battlefield, it is their love and perseverance that will determine the destiny of the new world. Child of Venus: Mahala Liangharad, a true child of Venus, conceived from the genetic material of the rebels and brought to birth only after their deaths, is seen as a beacon of hope in a colony still ravaged by the aftereffects of civil war. But her world is being torn apart by a drive for independence from Earth by the Venus colonists and rumors of a secret plan developed by the “Habbers,” cybernetically enhanced human dwellers of a mobile asteroid. A mysterious call from deep space offers Mahala a chance to fulfill her own destiny, along with the terrifying possibility of losing touch with everything she has ever known and loved.

Author : Paul Anaejionu,Nathan C. Goldman,Phillip J. Meeks
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 458 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Science
ISBN : STANFORD:36105030583137

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Space and Society by Paul Anaejionu,Nathan C. Goldman,Phillip J. Meeks Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Astronautics
ISBN : UCAL:B3533069

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Science and Technology Series by Anonim Pdf