Realizing Tomorrow – The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom; University of Nebraska Press; $34.95 (Hard cover); 2011.
Tighten your seat belt for a wonderful ride of a read that tells the incredible tale of the dedicated people who helped push the throttle forward to make private space travel reality.
Dubbs and Paat-Dahlstrom take a masterful and history-rich look at the true roots of space tourism, providing a needed course-correction for those who think off-Earth passenger travel is more giggle-factor than fact.
In many ways this book takes the reader “behind the scenes” – bringing together the people and chain of events that helped establish commercial spaceflight. Perhaps the comment from space visionary, Peter Diamandis, is the truism that has catapulted commercial space forward: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.”
Among those spotlighted in this book, you’ll find Gerard O’Neill, Robert Truax, Eric Anderson, Gary Hudson, Dennis Tito, Burt Rutan, and Elon Musk…along with many others that have helped shape and are continuing to shape private space travel.
There’s also a foreword by Charles Walker, a crew member on space shuttle missions 41-D, 51-D, and 61-B – an “industrialnaut” that took space commercialization to new heights.
“We, as individuals and organizations, must have ever-increasing opportunities to work and live in space and to make discoveries in the environments of spaceflight. Individuals need to see their living home planet as few ever have,” Walker comments. “We must create new technologies, new industries, and new wealth from an expanded human reality beyond Earth’s blue skies.”
For more information on this book, go to:
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Realizing-Tomorrow,674769.aspx
By Leonard David