Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space Paperback – Illustrated, July 29, 2008

Fairly short and easy to read magazine-style investigative-journalistichuman interest narrative about some of the exciting people and companiesinvolved in America's burgeoning private space industry: the X Prize,Burt Rutan, Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow and a few others.I thought the best chapters were about Burt Rutan and winning theXPrize, in particular the blow by blow account of all the troubles theyhad, very edge of the seat; also the backgrounds of Elon Musk and RobertBigelow. As a journalistic work it is ephemeral and will be outdated(except as a source for later writers) but if your fascinated bythe events, people and rocket ships, this is an excellent overview valuable right now,it's still too early to write the history. Belfiore writes for a number of periodicals likePopular Science, Wired, New Scientists, and claims to be one of only afew who are covering this exciting new industry, so he will certainly bean author to watch in the years ahead.

Rocketeers by Michael Belfiore is not so much a history of commercial space as it is a kind of survey of the state of affairs of the same as of about spring of 2007. If suffers a little from the stream of consciousness writing style, jumping from one subject to the other.Nevertheless it is an inspiring story about a small group of entrepreneurs who propose to open the high frontier of space for commerce, and incidentally for everyone who is not a highly paid, highly trained employee of some government.The subtext of Rocketeers, besides the dramatic stories of risk takers and dreamers building their own rockets, is a kind of wistfulness, bordering sometimes on anger on a future that never came to pass. Though Belfiore was busily being born in 1969, the year of Apollo 11, he shares the feeling that many of a certain age has experienced from time to time. It's the twenty first century, and where are those colonies on the Moon and interplanetary space liners we were promised.The reasons that future has not yet come to pass are many and complex, but many people, perhaps overly simplistically, blame NASA. The agency that was once toasted as the organization that took men to the Moon in eight short years is not regularly excoriated as being a bloated, unimaginative, and often incompetent bureaucracy. It is an image, considering what has happened since Apollo, that NASA has helped bring on itself and will have a hard time (some suggest impossible time) overcoming.No matter, say the heroes depicted in Rocketeers. If NASA can't bring about the future of a space faring civilization, we shall do it ourselves.Belfoire leaps effortlessly from story to story. Here is Peter Diamandis, who conceived and wrought the X Prize to build and launch into space the first private space craft. Here is Burt Rutan, master builder of air craft who won the X Prize with his SpaceShipOne and thus made commercial space almost respectable. Here is Elon Musk, the South African born Internet magnate who proposes to be the Prince Henry the Navigator of the space age by building his own fleet of low cost rockets as well as a manned space ship in partnership with NASA. And here is Robert Bigelow, the Los Vegas hotel tycoon whose interest in UFOs has inspired him to conceive and start to build the first private space station made from inflatable modules with technology first developed by NASA. And of course no story of the nascent commercial space sector can be complete without a look at Sir Richard Branson, a man who resembles nothing less than an Elizabethan Sea Dog whose Virgin Galactic proposes to be the first commercial space line.Belfiore mentions in passing how even NASA, once very adverse to commercial space, has now embraced the swashbuckling entrepreneurs like Musk and Bigelow as partners and potential providers of services.One curious omission in Rocketeers is its scant mention of commercial space efforts that occurred before the winning of the X Prize dating back to the 1970s. All of those early efforts failed for various reasons, but have proven nevertheless to be valuable lessons. The story of Otrag, Beal, the Rotary Rocket, and others deserves to be told.Belfiore ends his book with a perhaps fanciful look at the world of 2034. NASA, once the alpha and omega of space flight in the Western World, is relegated to providing paying passengers to private space station in Low Earth Orbit or (perhaps, though it is mentioned in passing) being part of the crew of a private/public expedition to Mars. The private sector in that year dominates space flight. Real life will probably not match exactly Belifoire's imagination, but one suspects that in certain aspects at least it will resemble it greatly, through no little credit to the people he writes about in Rocketeers.

The topic is definitely interesting, but this treatment is scatterbrained and unsatisfying. The author skips over all the interesting technical details of the various space flight efforts he covers, in favor of a breathless hero-worship. There are no photos or drawings even vaguely interesting to an engineer, no timeline, no real discussion of the legal and financial issues. In the final chapter, he concludes that reporting on the private spaceflight industry is beyond the abilities of any human being(??). Having read the previous chapters, we're inclined to think it's just beyond the ability of this author.

This is a short, easy to read story about many of the companies and personalities involved in the privatization of space flight, aka "NewSpace" that ends in 2006-2007. The 2008 paperback version has a two-page epilogue that has some updated information through early 2008. The book is well-written and very interesting, but is is beginning to become quite dated five years later. I would love to see a second book like this from Michael, especially since 2013 is looking to be a very exciting year for NewSpace. In the meantime, there are many blogs and websites that have more current infromation that will be useful after you get some historical background from the this book.

Now that everyone seems to be criticising NASA, with much justification people are looking for alternatives. Privatizations is one such option. I have no doubt that it could be a good option.However although this book had some interesting stories which I quite enjoyed I am yet to see much evidence for any real results for this privatizations for example, Virgin Galactic always seems to be only a few years to go.

近年、アメリカを中心ににわかに活気付きつつある民間宇宙産業と宇宙旅行に関するドキュメンタリー。本書の前半はまずPeter DiamandisによるX Prize (後にAnsari X Prize)の発起に始まり、同コンテストに参加の名乗りを上げたカナダのBrian Feeney、NASAの元エンジニアJim Akkerman、大ヒットゲームDoomの製作者John Carmackらの活動を紹介しつつ、最終的な勝者となるBurt RutanとScaled Compositesの事績へと物語が進行します。そして彼らのSpaceShipOneがいかにして製作され、高度367,500フィートの宇宙空間へ到達したかが語られます。本書の後半はAnsari X Prize以後（2004年〜2007年頃）の民間宇宙産業の動きを扱っています。リアジェット機を改造して宇宙旅行を手短に可能にしようとするRocketplane、巨大な資本とScaled Compositesの技術支援の下に宇宙旅行ビジネスを強力に推進するVirginGalactic。軌道上への安価な資材運搬ロケット製造を目指して、天才起業家Elon Muskによって立ち上げられたSpaceX。軌道上の民間人滞在施設建造と人類の本格的宇宙進出の夢を抱き、独自の宇宙ステーション開発に乗り出したラスベガスの資産家Robert Bigelow。宇宙を次の舞台と見定めた人々の活躍が、著者Michael Belfioreの手によって情熱的に描かれています。個人的には、有名な割に文献の少ないBurt Rutanの活躍がまとめられている箇所が興味深く読めました。2011年よりVirginGalacticが民間宇宙旅行を開始する予定となっています。本書の物語は、本書の終わりで完結するものではなく、今まさに進行しているのだと思います。本書の登場人物達の試みは全て失敗するのかもしれないし、あるいは宇宙へ気軽に行ける時代のさきがけになるのかもしれない。そういう意味で結末が未知である点と、あっと驚くような結末への期待を込めて、星4つとさせてもらいました。