Beyond: Our Future in Space (37 page)

  
4
. “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” a speech by President John F. Kennedy to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, online at http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html.

  
5
. Many books have been written about the Apollo program. Two of the best are:
Apollo: The Race to the Moon
by C. Murray and C. B. Cox 1999. New York: Simon & Schuster; and
Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind’s Greatest Adventure
by D. Parry 2009. Chatham, UK: Ebury Press. For two insider perspectives, see:
Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond
by G. Kranz 2000. New York: Simon & Schuster; and
In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969
by F. French and C. Burgess 2007. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

  
6
.
John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon
by J. M. Logsdon 2010. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  
7
.
In the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture
by J. T. Andrews and A. A. Siddiqi 2011. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

  
8
.
A Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974
by A. A. Siddiqi 2000. Special Publication NASA-SP-2000-4408, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

  
9
.
Apollo Expeditions to the Moon
, ed. by E. M. Cortright 1975. Special Publication NASA-SP-350, online at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-11-4.html.

10
. In particular, the public imagination was captured by “Earthrise,” the image of the Earth rising over the lunar landscape, taken by William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Nature photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”

11
. “Animals as Cold Warriors: Missiles, Medicine, and Man’s Best Friend,” article at the US National Library of Medicine website, online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/animals/laika.html.

12
. Quote from a news conference in Moscow, after his retirement in 1998, reported fourteen years later online at http://web.archive.org/web/20060108184335/http://www.dogsinthenews.com/issues/0211/articles/021103a.htm.

13
. It’s reasonable to question how much money is spent on something as seemingly esoteric as the space program, but NASA is almost literally a drop in the federal bucket. NASA’s budget is close to $18 billion, or 15 cents a day for every American. That’s forty times less than annual military spending. In terms of other things on which Americans spend money, it’s thirty times less than gambling, three times less than spending on pets, and two times less than spending on pizza. If everyone would hold the pepperoni, we could send out more space missions.

14
.
The Sidereal Messenger
by G. Galilei 1610 is a short pamphlet containing his observations of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the Milky Way. The original is a very rare book, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a commentary was published in 2010 in
Isis
, vol. 101, no. 3, pp. 644–45.

15
. The learning curve is apparent in the success rate of missions to the inner Solar System: the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Using tabulations on Wikipedia (NASA information is too chaotically organized to do it using their websites), the success rate of space probes went from 65 percent in the 1960s to 73 percent in the 1970s to 87 percent in the 1980s. It took a downtick to 72 percent in the 1990s and then improved again to 91 percent in the 2000s.

16
.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
by C. Sagan 1994. New York: Random House, pp. xv–xvi.

17
. By the time of its final flight in 2011, the Space Shuttle had served fifteen years longer than the time for which it had been designed. After a call for proposals from museums and public institutions, NASA distributed the four remaining orbiters: original Shuttles Atlantis and Discovery, Challenger’s replacement Endeavor, and an atmospheric test orbiter named Enterprise. Kennedy Space Center, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the California Science Center, and the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City were the lucky recipients.

18
. After the Challenger disaster, President Reagan formed the Rogers Commission to investigate. In their televised hearings, physicist Richard Feynman had a memorable moment when he dipped an O-ring into a cup of ice water to show how it became less resilient at the low temperatures at the time of launch. He was scathing about the wildly unrealistic estimates of reliability from NASA engineers and the stark failures of NASA management: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Rogers Commission Report 1986, Appendix F.

4: Revolution Is Coming

  
1
. NASA still attracts talented scientists and engineers. I’ve taught more than 800 engineers at six NASA centers, and most of them feel zeal and passion for their work. But the agency’s ability to attract the best and the brightest peaked during the Apollo era. In the 1970s and 1980s, the lure of Silicon Valley proved stronger; in the 1990s and 2000s, the rise of the Internet and the “dot-com boom” offered a new frontier with no apparent limits. Like any government agency, NASA has layers of bureaucracy and the culture can often be far from entrepreneurial.

  
2
.
NASA’s Efforts to Reduce Unneeded Infrastructure and Facilities
2013, Report Number IG-13-008, Office of the Inspector General, Washington, DC.

  
3
.
Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program
by P. Duggins 2007. Tampa: University of Florida Press.

  
4
. As we’ve seen, Russia had more than its fair share of space pioneers and visionaries. The technical education provided by major Russian universities was unparalleled, even as the country limped along with decrepit infrastructure and uncompetitive industries. Russian scientists and engineers were treated well and provided with perks that made life tolerable. But all that changed with the chaos that followed the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, universities have been starved of resources and Russia has been suffering a severe brain drain that has sent much of its technical talent to the United States and Western Europe.

  
5
. As reported by National Public Radio in a 2012 story on mounting problems in the Soviet space program, online at http://www.npr.org/2012/03/12/148247197/for-russias-troubled-space-program-mishaps-mount.

  
6
. NASA’s budget hovers around $18 billion, and it hasn’t changed much in real terms in more than a decade. At the moment, the pie is roughly divided into 28 percent for Earth and space science and astrophysics, 22 percent for the development of rockets and propulsion systems, and 22 percent for the International Space Station, with the rest for aeronautics and other technology development.

  
7
. “The Interplanetary Internet” by J. Jackson 2005, published by the online magazine of the IEEE, at http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/the-interplanetary-internet.

  
8
. A mesmerizing video showing Baumgartner’s perspective as he plunged 24 miles has had more than five million views on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raiFrxbHxV0. In 2014, Google VP Alan Eustace broke Baumgartner’s altitude record (though not his speed record) by falling and parachuting from 135,890 feet to the ground in just fifteen minutes.

  
9
. The story of the competition between astronauts and test pilots to reach space was well told by Tom Wolfe in his book
The Right Stuff
1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Mercury 7 astronauts were not originally intended to fly their space capsules, and Wolfe contrasted their roles with the high skill of test pilots such as Chuck Yeager, who took their planes to the edge of space. Wolfe’s book was made into a popular film in 1983.

10
.
Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1: Breaking the Sound Barrier
by D. A. Pisano, F. R. van der Linden, and F. H. Winter 2006. Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

11
.
Press On! Further Adventures in the Good Life
by C. Yeager and C. Leerhsen 1997. New York: Bantam Books.

12
.
At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Flight Program
by M. O. Thompson 1992. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

13
. The US Air Force considered an altitude of 50 miles or 80 kilometers to be the limit of space. However, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the world governing body of aviation records, set the limit of space at 62 miles or 100 kilometers; by that criterion, only one Air Force pilot was truly an astronaut.

14
.
American X-Vehicles: An Inventory from X-1 to X-50
by D. R. Jenkins, T. Landis, and J. Miller 2003, Monographs in Space History (Centennial of Flight), NASA Special Publication Number 31, NASA History Office, Washington, DC.

15
. Space poetry is a small niche. Several collections of poetry about science include poems inspired by the space program, particularly Apollo and journeys to the Moon, most notably
Songs from Unsung Worlds: Science in Poetry
1988, ed. by Bonnie Gordon. London: Birkhäuser; and
Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science
2006, ed. by Robert Crawford. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amazingly, it wasn’t until 2009 that an astronaut penned a poem while in orbit. The honor went to American Don Pettit for “Halfway to Pluto.” Also in that year, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata wrote a stanza as part of a free-association chain poem based on venerable Japanese
renga
and
renku
forms.

16
.
Astronaut Fact Book
2013, NASA Publication NP-2013-04-003-JSC, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC.

17
.
The Colbert Report
, Episode 1012, broadcast on November 3, 2005, on Comedy Central. See episodes online at http://www.thecolbertreport.cc.com.

18
. “Prospects of Space Tourism” by S. Abitzsch 1996, presented at the Ninth European Aerospace Congress, hosted by Space Future.

19
.
Space Tourism: Do You Want to Go?
by J. Spencer 2004. Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books.

20
. The swift death of the program at the hands of the US House of Representatives is recounted on the NASA Watch website: http://nasawatch.com/archives/2005/06/nasas-first-and-last-artist-in-residence.html.

21
.
Inventing the Internet
by J. Abbate 1999. Cambridge: MIT Press. Also see: “The Internet: On its International Origins and Collaborative Vision” by R. Hauben 2004.
Amateur Computerist
, vol. 2, no. 2, and “A Brief History of the Internet” by B. M. Leiner et al. 2009, online at http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet.

22
. “Eisenhower’s Warning: The Military-Industrial Complex Forty Years Later” by W. D. Hartung 2001.
World Policy Journal
, vol. 18, no. 1.

23
.
Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex
by J. Ledbetter 2011. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

5: Meet the Entrepreneurs

  
1
. “Private Space Exploration a Long and Thriving Tradition” by M. Burgan 2012. In
Bloomberg View
, online at http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-07-18/private-space-exploration-a-long-and-thriving-tradition.

  
2
. “The Wit and Wisdom of Burt Rutan” by E. R. Hedman 2011. In
The Space Review
, online at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1910/1.

  
3
.
Rutan—The Canard Guru
by M. S. Rajamurthy 2009. India: National Aerospace Laboratories.

  
4
.
Voyager
by J. Yeager and D. Rutan 1988. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Also:
Voyager: The World Flight: The Official Log, Flight Analysis and Narrative Explanation
by J. Norris 1988. Northridge, CA: Jack Norris.

  
5
. “Burt Rutan—Aerospace Engineer,” interview on March 3, 2012, on BigThink website, http://bigthink.com/users/burtrutan.

  
6
. The excitement of winning the X Prize was captured in the documentary
Mojave Magic: A Turtle’s Eye View of SpaceShipOne
. This 2005 short film was directed and written by Jim Sayers, produced by Dag Gano and Jim Sayers, and distributed by Desert Turtle Productions.

  
7
.
Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way
by R. Branson 2002. London: Virgin Books Limited. See also
Screw Business As Usual
by R. Branson 2011. London: Penguin Group.

  
8
. “Richard Branson: Virgin Entrepreneur” by M. Vinnedge 2009.
Success
magazine, online at http://www.success.com/article/richard-branson-virgin-entrepreneur.

  
9
.
Dirty Tricks: The Inside Story of British Airways’ Secret War Against Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic
by M. Gregory 1994. London: Little, Brown.

10
. “Up: The Story Behind Richard Branson’s Goal to Make Virgin a Galactic Success” by A. Higginbotham 2013.
Wired
magazine, online at http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/03/features/up.

11
. From a Reddit discussion on October 17, 2013, online at http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1onkop/i_am_peter_diamandis_founder_of_xprize/.

12
.
We
by C. Lindbergh 1927. New York: Putnam and Sons. The title refers to the fact that Lindbergh never referred to himself in making his historic flight—he always twinned himself with his plane, the
Spirit of St. Louis
.