Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Belfiore
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 359490
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0061149039
Dewey Decimal Number: 629
EAN: 9780061149030
ASIN: 0061149039
Publication Date: August 1, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Just arrived! This is a brand new, unopened copy in printer-fresh mint condition. NOT remainder marked, used, or ex-library.
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Product Description
On June 21, 2004, SpaceShipOne, built by aircraft designer Burt Rutan, entered space and ushered in the commercial space age. Investment capital began to pour into the new commercial spaceflight industry. Richard Branson's VirginGalactic will begin ferrying space tourists out of the atmosphere in 2010. Las Vegas hotelier Robert Bigelow is developing the world's first commercial space station (i.e., space hotel). These space entrepreneurs, including Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, now see space as the next big thing. In Rocketeers, Michael Belfiore goes behind the scenes of this nascent industry, capturing its wild-west, anything-goes flavor. Likening his research to "hanging out in the Wright brothers' barn," Belfiore offers an inspiring and entertaining look at the people who are not afraid to make their bold dreams a reality.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Meet the people making privatge space flight happen April 27, 2008
Rocketeers provides a quick introduction to the people making the current boom in private space flight happen. It is a well written book that covers the people involved in an accessible way. The advent of private space flight that may be available to ordinary people makes this an exciting time for anyone interested in space.
The author is a journalist and writer, not an engineer or technologist. This shows in the writing of Rocketeers. It is a smooth flowing easy read that focuses on personalities with only the briefest mention of the technology involved and little discussion of the economics. This makes the book entertaining and approachable, but it leaves much of the story untold. I would have liked to read more about the competing technologies and how the different companies have chosen them. The whole topic of whether these companies can possibly be economically viable is not really examined at all. That left the book feeling a little light weight to me.
Rocketeers does succeed in providing a snap shot of an interesting time. Its broad overview and focus on the personalities will be helpful to readers who have not been following these events.
 Looking forward to "Rocketeers 2.0"! December 31, 2007
What a great book on the future of private space! I hope the author will
write "Rocketeers 2.0" real soon. Looking forward to following his career as a free-lance author. His contacts in the infant civilian rocket sector will pay major dividends for valuable future history of the civilian rocket boom years
Americans We All Admire December 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Finally the Americans we (foreigners) have all admired in the past, are coming back to life. This book is a well written "easy read", about American entrepreneurs doing what Americans do best ... inspire the rest of us with new exciting things e.g. (almost) affordable space flight for all.
It doesn't get too bogged down in technicalities, but gives you a nice insiders view of these small companies and the people in them.
Read this book to give you inspiration or just to cheer yourself up ... after watching the latest TV newsreal about the latest multi-million dollar "precision guided munitions" destroying some simple schmucks in a cave in who-knows-where ...
Fascinating stories of privately-financed space visionaries December 28, 2007
For those old enough to remember it, the moving image of Neil Armstrong stepping on to the moon has long since become part of space lore. (Michael Belfiore, the author of Rocketeers, admits that he himself learned about the moon walk from his school librarian.) Meanwhile, very quickly, the world has come to take satellites and GPS and space shuttles very much for granted. Space has become sort of yesterday and Mars will be in someone else's lifetime. And lately our attention has become very much fixed on our own atmosphere right here below, on the challenges of global warming.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that a small bunch of (well, I almost said crackpot) engineers, backed not by NASA but by a small number of (I almost said crackpot again) visionaries with fortunes to throw away are seriously looking up. They are thinking of sending people like you and me into space, perhaps flying us through the upper reaches of space to Europe in 30 minutes. Some of them, in their own way, are even working on global warming.
Ever heard of a rocket-powered bicycle? Neither had I, but then, unlike the maverick engineers and geniuses here, I just don't ordinarily think in terms of rocketry and air foils. People like Burt Rutan do. Rutan started out with model airplanes, graduated to designing a high-performance airplane that you could build at home in your garage, and later designed the fantastic aircraft that flew non-stop around the world without refueling. With a financier named Tim Pickens (he invented the rocket bike), Rutan came up with a way to send three people into space in a rocket capsule launched from the bottom of a larger plane. The feat won the $10 million X Prize for the first privately-financed company to get two people besides the pilot into space and back (the rules required that the feat be repeated a short time later).
As much as anything, Rocketeers is an account of people like Burt Rutan - people who eat, sleep, and drink rocketry and space - and the financial and physical risks they take (care to be the first person to test a revolutionary new space re-entry design?). The author, who got much of the material for this book during article assignments for aviation and science magazines, is sometimes right there in the lab or the hangar with the engineers and on the airstrip with the pilots. One engineer asks "Want to get your hands dirty?" and Michael Belfiore soon finds himself helping to make a vehicle model out of foam core. ("I had to decide whether I could do this and retain my reporter's objectivity," he wrote.) Fortunately, all required technical explanations are folded neatly and painlessly into each of the stories at a level easily within the range of the general reader.
Belfiore makes clear that this is a story that is just beginning and concludes with a chapter that looks a few decades into the future when, just perhaps (this seems as crazy as the idea of walking on the moon once did), a "solar city in the sky" will be able to wirelessly beam down enough power for an entire country. In this gloomy day of melting icecaps and stranded polar bears, it's refreshing to get back that old illusion of a future that we are really in charge of - and encouraging to think that space exploration will also somehow help us deal with global warming. Meanwhile, Rocketeers is a fascinating report about what space "privateers" are doing today and what's likely to happen soon.
SpaceShipOne, Government Zero! November 6, 2007
Belfiore describes the motives behind the inspiring X-Prize. Recounting some of the hilarious disappointments of individuals wanting to go to space using the NASA astronaut path. A great read. Its good to see the dream of achieving regular space travel being taken up by the private sector and having it documented in an easy read like this.
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