Lost In Space
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
In Lost in Space, Greg Klerkx argues that ever since the triumphant Apollo moon missions, the Space Age has been stuck in the wrong orbit, and that NASA, the agency whose daring once fueled the world's extra-terrestrial vision, has been largely responsible for keeping it there. Stripped of its Cold War mandate, NASA has become an introverted technocracy whose signature post-Apollo projects - the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station - are perhaps the two most spectacular boondoggles of the modern era. Through it all, NASA has ignored, belittled and in some cases actively quashed the one concept that could change the equation for the future of humans in space: human spaceflight as a free market activity. Despite this, a new Space Age is, in fact, in the making, led by dreamers, investors, inventors and even renegades from NASA itself. Drawn from dozens of interviews, extensive research, and Klerkx's own experiences as a senior manager with the SETI Institute, Lost in Space chronicles the flashpoints where the space establishment and the 'alternative' space community are battling for competing visions. Like the dream of space exploration itself, Lost in Space is less about science or technology than it is about people: their motivations, their ideas, and how their life's work is driven by an almost biological need to reach for the stars. Written with intelligence, style and wit, it is an elegy for the brief, bright Space Age that was, as well as the first comprehensive chronicle of a dawning new Space Age that could literally change the course of humankind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sprawling and sometimes polemical account, Klerkx, formerly associated with the SETI Institute, excoriates what he sees as NASA's present-day loss of vision. During the Apollo program, NASA's goal was manned space exploration. But over the last 29 years, the agency has scaled down its vision, content to send unmanned missions to the other planets and keep human beings in earth orbit with the short-lived Skylab, the troubled shuttle fleet and the "money-gobbling" International Space Station. Klerkx draws out some of the threads in the tangled web that connects the perpetually feuding NASA fiefdoms, NASA's major suppliers (and major congressional contributors), like Boeing, and the politicians who write the checks. He believes that private-sector entrepreneurs will wrest future space exploration away from the self-serving NASA bureaucracy, which too often views space in terms of military and strategic applications. Klerkx presents the nouveaux riches businessmen investing millions in space-related projects, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, as well as eccentric visionaries like Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society. The Columbia disaster hangs over Klerkx's tale like a dark shadow.. Some readers may think Klerkx is still under the spell of his boyhood dream of being an astronaut and giving short shrift to arguments against human space exploration. But readers who share Klerkx's dream will be captivated by his vision of what needs to be done to resume manned space flights and of what humankind is capable of achieving.