Books
Spaceplanes: From Airport to Spaceport (Astronomers' Universe)
By Matthew A. Bentley
Buy From Amazon List price: $34.95 Amazon price: $23.07
"Spaceplanes From Airport to Spaceport presents a vision of the near future in which space vehicles can take off from an international airport, refuel in space, and fly regularly between the Earth and the Moon. The book is built on the solid engineering foundation prepared by David Ashford in his book Spaceflight Revolution, but develops the argument.
This is a coherent, lucid, and optimistic picture of the future – aimed directly at the reader as a future space passenger – which explains why the Space Tourist market could easily become the single most important factor in the mid-term future development of space transportation. In a few years it will be possible to board a spaceplane and fly into Earth orbit, and perhaps visit a space station. Later development could include refuelling in orbit to take a tour of cislunar space.
As the latest news has shown, the successful flight of SpaceShipOne and the imminent inauguration of Virgin Galactic’s sub-orbital rides from the New Mexico desert have already begun this process.
This book explains the technical details of precisely how all this can be accomplished within the next few decades."
Explaining Research: How to Reach Key Audiences to Advance Your Work
By Dennis Meredith
Buy From Amazon List price: $35.00 Amazon price: $25.20
Explaining Research is the first comprehensive communications guidebook for scientists, engineers, and physicians. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from a forty-year career in research communications, Dennis Meredith maps out how scientists can utilize sophisticated tools and techniques to disseminate their discoveries to important audiences. He explains how to use websites, blogs, videos, webinars, old-fashioned lectures, news releases, and lay-level articles to reach key audiences, emphasizing along the way that a strong understanding of the audience in question will allow a more effective communication tailored to a unique background and set of needs.
In addition to drawing on the experience of the author, the book also includes excerpts from interviews with 45 of the country's leading science communications experts, including academics, authors, journalists, and public information officers."
As the entreprenerurial space market grows, the ability to explain clearly your innovation to potential collaborators in many disciplines will be critical. This book can help us all have more successfull communications for growth and sustainability.
Paradise Regained: The Regreening of Earth
By Les Johnson, Gregory L. Matloff, and C Bangs
Buy From Amazon List price: $27.50 Amazon price: $20.90
Since the formation of our solar system, the resources and ecological state of Earth have undergone many changes. The environmental challenges facing humanity today, as the authors posit them, will not be resolved simply by conservation and Earth-based alternative technologies. Paradise Regained considers the environmental dilemma and highlights the risk of humankind's future extinction from environmental degradation. Human population growth, climate change, and the strained sustainability of the few remaining habitats for wild life are all discussed.
The authors, however, are not discouraged and offer a potential solution through the development of space. Not only will extraterrestrial resources help avert environmental disaster, but will also provide the basis for continued technological and societal progress. The resources of the solar system will help meet our projected industrial needs and feed our industry once terrestrial sources are depleted. Space-based power generation systems will work synergistically with Earth-based conservation. Paradise Regained concludes with the discussion on how closed ecological systems in space will help us to build a prosperous and sustainable future for all humanity.
Collaborative Customer Relationship Management: Taking CRM to the Next Level
By Alexander H. Kracklauer, D. Quiinn Mills, Dirk Seifert, Editors
Buy From Amazon List price: $109.00 Amazon price: $87.00
"Driven by rapidly changing business environments and increasingly demanding consumers, many organizations are searching for new ways to achieve and retain a competitive advantage via customer intimacy and CRM. In this context, new strategic frameworks and cooperation with everybody along the whole value chain are needed to allow managers to deal with the changes in shopping patterns of consumers. This book presents a new strategic framework that has been tested successfully with various global companies. New management concepts such as Collaborative Forecasting and Replenishment, CRM, Category Management, and Mass Customization are integrated into one holistic approach with a view to jointly develop customer bonding and loyalty. Experts from companies like McKinsey, Procter&Gamble, Accenture, and AC Nielsen, as well as authors from renowned academic institutions, offer valuable insights on how to redesign organizations for the future." It's a stretch to apply "Collaborative Customer" the way its used here to public-private partnerships in space commerce, but perhaps I'm just ahead of my time.
If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government
By William D. Eggers and John O'Leary
Buy From Amazon List price: $24.95 Amazon price: $16.47
"The American people are frustrated with their government-dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer. Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing. William Eggers and John O'Leary explain how to do it. The key? Understand-and avoid-the common pitfalls that trip up public-sector leaders during the journey from idea to results."
Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet Conspiracy that Transformed the U.S. Space Program (Apogee Books Space Series)
By Jeffrey Manber
Buy From Amazon List price: $28.95 Amazon price: $22.00
"Twenty years ago the door to greater commercial cooperation in space with Russia opened, albeit slowly and with considerable opposition in some quarters. Jeff Foust reviews an insider's account of the efforts to take advantage of Russian space capabilities in commercial ventures." From the Space Review
International Space Commerce: Building from Scratch
By Roger Handberg
Buy From Amazon List price: $65.00 Amazon price: $65.00
"Handberg offers a historical analysis of the international politicians, economists, scientists, and industrialists who have sought to create an entrepreneurial space program, and he brings a current political perspective to the risks, goals, and predicted rewards of space commerce, which may include such enterprises as launch vehicles, telecommunications, and remote sensing. He examines these efforts from three interdependent factors--economics, politics, and technology. For readers interested in space policy as well as technology policy, this volume is an eye-opening portal to the fantasies and realities of space commerce both here on Earth and in the heavens."
Innovation for Underdogs: How to Make the Leap from What If to Now What
By David Pensak and Elizabeth Licorish
Buy From Amazon List price: $19.99 Amazon price: $15.99
"Innovation for Underdogs explains how innovation is a practical process, not some miraculous insight. Everyone can innovate! This book is a witty, intelligent, and humorous entry into the mind of one of the world's greatest innovators, Dr. David Pensak. Creator of the first Internet firewall, Dr. Pensak has amassed a huge wealth of innovation inspiration through his own critical work. But he's discovered some of the greatest truths about innovation through his experiences with others--his childhood lessons from Einstein, his work as a university professor, and his highly esteemed innovation lectures throughout the world." Clever problem definition, creative solution development, test/modification/evaluation, and practical marketing. It sounds like the world of commercial space to me.
The Rocket Company (Library of Flight Series)
By Patrick J. G. Stiennon
Buy From Amazon List price: $34.95 Amazon price: $29.88
(Excerpted from an Amazon.com review by Juan Suros, 2005)
"This book is a case study for launching the exploitation of space through private means. It has a thin framing story in which the writer claims to be writing a history of a company that is developing a reusable launch vehicle for sale on the open market. As a fictional business case study, it makes for very interesting reading. The author knows his rocket science and celestial mechanics and lays out his ideas very well.
For a book on space travel, this book is unique in my experience in the detail to which it analyses the business requirements needed to make the ideas work. The idea that the rocket company intends only to manufacture and sell the launch vehicle described in the book is a big departure from the sort of space advocacy books that have been published since the great retreat from the moon."
Moonrush: Improving Life on Earth with the Moon's Resources: Apogee Books Space Series 43
By Dennis Wingo
Buy From Amazon List price: $24.95 Amazon price: $22.45
"If by some magic process humanity was able to go to the stars tomorrow and find habitable worlds we would probably want to design a society based upon modern technology. We can't do this but we can look at our Earthbound society and think about how to redesign it so that it will work better. It is like a giant game of the SIMS but in the real world. This book examines how the exploration of space, specifically a commercial base on the Moon and Mars would transform our economies on the Earth as surely as the discovery of the New World transformed the old world of Europe. From Platinum Group Metals for fuel cells, manufacturing high tech metals and robots to the building of a fusion reactor, the Moon holds great promise for a high tech manufacturing future."