Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space download epub

An interesting book set during the first stage of the new space race. It starts from the successful SpaceShipOne winning of the X prize. There is a large group of companies that existed during this period, however only a few of them are left now. Virgin Galactic was a front runner, but has been passed by SpaceX and others. However some of the predictions have not come true and seem dated.

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.

Fairly short and easy to read magazine-style investigative-journalistic
human interest narrative about some of the exciting people and companies
involved 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 the
XPrize, in particular the blow by blow account of all the troubles they
had, very edge of the seat; also the backgrounds of Elon Musk and Robert
Bigelow. As a journalistic work it is ephemeral and will be outdated
(except as a source for later writers) but if your fascinated by
the 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 like
Popular Science, Wired, New Scientists, and claims to be one of only a
few who are covering this exciting new industry, so he will certainly be
an author to watch in the years ahead.

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.

A fun, engaging and a bit scattershot look at the visionaries trying to jump start the private space flight business. The book already needs serious updating as many of the companies and projects featured have died, morphed into something else, are still struggling to hit oft-delayed schedules or, in a case or two, have accomplished major goals. Belfiore has successfully captured many of the personalities involved and does an excellent job explaining the technologies involved as well.