Blogging the Moon, a new book from Griffin Media challenges readers to think hard about the future of human spaceflight - and how it could be developed.NASA has been in the news lately for reasons beyond the exciting discoveries of various and vast quantities of water on the Moon. Unfortunately, the long, drawn out repositioning of the US national space program has brought the space community to loggerheads, leaving the future of the last superpower's manned space program in jeopardy. The upheaval caused by fights over rocket designs and suppliers and the "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe" formula being used to select a new space direction has placed the US space program in peril.
For over two decades Paul Spudis has had a front row seat to the U.S. national space program and has written extensively about space policy and space science. His opinions and insights recently found a home on the Air and Space Magazine blog, The Once and Future Moon.
Beginning with his reporting from India in October of 2008 (as the principal investigator of NASA's Mini-SAR, watching his radar being launched to the Moon aboard Chandrayaan-1), Paul's easy to read essays have followed and reported on the growing upheaval in the space community and the battle being waged for the ideological control of and funding for space exploration, and the resulting chaos.
In keeping with his call for a strong US human space program, Paul outlines and explains the importance of creating a sustainable space program through the use of the Moon's resources to create new capabilities to live and work in space and move humanity off planet. These essays and reader comments are compiled in the book.
"The reaction to the idea of humans living somewhere other than on Earth is interesting and reflects a basic division within humanity," Paul notes in a recent post titled Embrace the end of Human Spaceflight. "For any new frontier, there are always those who go and those who stay. Those who stay cannot imagine the motivations of those who go, often attributing irrationality – if not insanity – to their actions.
"Space is a frontier not yet fully opened," he argues. "Although we understand how to do it in principle, we do not yet have the practical knowledge to make it feasible. I have argued that if space is to become a future home for humanity, we must learn how to extract what we need in space from what we find there. Unless we desire future human space missions to be forever consigned to the current template of bringing everything with us, learning to live off the land is a requirement regardless of where we go or what we do."
A bonus DVD tht comes with Blogging the Moon includes a slideshow of over 30 years of Dr Spudis' pictures researching our Moon, as well as his in-depth presentation about the Moon's resources.
• Blogging the Moon
Published by Griffin Media
ISBN10-13: 1926837177 : 9781926837178
• Buy it from amazon.co.uk
• Air and Space Magazine blog, The Once and Future Moon
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