Blogging for Wired.com from the DARPA Urban Challenge

I'm on assignment for Wired News covering the DARPA Urban Challenge, which launched today. See my preview article at www.wired.com, and then head over to the Danger Room for my on-the-scene updates leading up to the main event on November 3.

My commentary in Financial Times

My commentary on commercial spaceflight and its relevance to this month's Sputnik anniversary just went up on the website of Financial Times.

Choice quote, from former space shuttle astronaut and now author Tom Jones:

"I think we're stepping into a new era of human spaceflight," says Thomas Jones. "The ranks of astronauts will be augmented by commercial pilots and adventure guides accompanying the passengers into orbit. They'll be industrial astronauts, if you will, maybe building their own resort facility, or more likely an industrial facility in orbit."

Rocketeers video

It's here! My video production partner Mark Greene of Pecos Pictures posted a video promoting my book Rocketeers to YouTube last night.

The piece includes video we shot in Huntsville, Alabama along with great clips from many of the major players in the commercial spaceflight industry. Take four minutes to check it out--and turn it up!

Many thanks to Mark, who wrote, directed, and produced the piece, and to all the good people at NASA, Orion Propulsion, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR Aerospace, ATK, the X PRIZE Foundation, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace, and Virgin Galactic who contributed footage.

Sputnik, SpaceShipOne, and Me

Today marks two important anniversaries in the history of space travel. Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched a beeping basketball sized satellite called Sputnik, and with it the space age. Sputnik was the first artificial satellite, and it lit a fire under the US government. As a result of it, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

NASA, as we all know, went from hardly being able to get a rocket off the ground to landing people on the moon in 12 short years. ARPA, originally charged with furthering US spaceflight technology, ceded that mission to NASA and shifted its focus to advanced computer research, which in turn led to the creation of the Internet right around the time Neil and Buzz made their famous moonwalk in 1969.

NASA astronauts haven't left Earth orbit since 1972. ARPA became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and is now engaged in cutting edge research in fields like hypersonic jets, vegetable-based aviation fuels and other alternative energy sources, bionic limbs, robot surgeons, intelligent machines, and a lot of other areas that could lead to advances as important as the Internet. DARPA is the subject of my next book. As for space travel....

Today also marks the three-year anniversary of an event that could have as great an impact as Sputnik. On October 4, 2004, test pilot Brian Binnie, working for Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, flew out of the atmosphere in SpaceShipOne to win the Ansari X PRIZE for back-to-back flights by a privately built manned spacecraft. Less than a week before, Binnie's colleague Mike Melvill had made the first X PRIZE-qualifying flight, and earlier that year, on a June 21st test flight, Melvill had become the world's first commercial astronaut.

The commercial space age launched by SpaceShipOne is the subject of my book Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian/HarperCollins, 2007).

In celebration of this dual anniversary, I'm giving a talk at the next meeting of the New York Space Society at New York University. If you're in the area, stop by. The meeting is at 4:00 on Saturday, October 6, at the Silver Center for Arts and Science, 32 Waverly Place, room 806. I'll have books to sign.

Rocketeers on Bloomberg radio, in Air & Space mag

There's a transcript and a nice write-up of an interview I gave Bloomberg Radio recently at bloomberg.com. I talked with Robin Schatz about the viability of commercial spaceflight as a business and a bit about Bigelow Aerospace and other space ventures. There's a mugshot of me there too, taken on the Bloomberg roof.

The Bloomberg headquarters in New York City is every bit as astounding as the Bigelow plant. I wish I had gotten some pictures. The lobby features soaring, multistory windows, a vast snack bar full of free food and drinks. The side areas somehow manage to convey the same open-to-the-sky feeling, stuffed as they are with TV studios, radio booths, acres of flat screen TVs streaming news feeds, and hundreds of reporters pounding away at keyboards. Doing my interview there, I had the same science-fiction-come-true feeling I had talking with Robert Bigelow as we looked out of his conference room windows at space station modules being built.

Also check out the current issue of Air & Space Smithsonian and the magazine's website for an excerpt of chapter 6 of Rocketeers, about Rocketplane.

PopSci cover story on Astrium spaceplane

The October issue of Popular Science is out, with my cover story on EADS Astrium's new tourist spaceship design.

The ship, the size of a business jet, with twin jet engines for takeoffs and landings, and a single rocket engine for the boost to space, bears more than a passing resemblance to Rocketplane Global's spaceship design.

That's no accident, as Astrium's chief technical officer Robert Lainé confirmed for my article. After looking at all the major designs being floated, including air-launch like SpaceShipOne, vertical-takeoff-and-landing like Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin's designs, the Astrium team settled on Rocketplane's jet-and-rocket hybrid concept because they felt it would be the most cost-effective to operate from multiple airports.

Astrium is a wholly owned subsidiary of the company that owns Airbus, and it is also a major contractor for the European Space Agency. The company plans to build the as-yet-unnamed spaceplane for separate owner-operators whose orders for the ship would help finance its construction.

C-SPAN's Book TV, NPR's Marketplace, and Amazon.com

For those of you who missed my talk about my book Rocketeers on C-SPAN's Book TV last weekend, you'll have another chance to catch it on Saturday, August 25 at 10:45 a.m. Eastern Time. You can also watch it online right now at www.booktv.org.

Coming up, I'll be on Marketplace, broadcast nationally on National Public Radio. I taped the segment yesterday, but the producers didn't know whether it would air Monday or Tuesday. Check your local listings for show times, and check the show's archives after it airs.

Have you read Rocketeers? Think it's good enough to recommend? Head over to Amazon.com and be the first to post a review!

Bamboozled by Google

And now a word from our (former) sponsor....

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed the appearance of ads served by Google to the right of this post late last year, and then their disappearance a couple of weeks ago.

I ran those ads through the Google Adsense program and saw a (very) modest return from them--until Google abruptly terminated my Adsense account with no other explanation than that my site had generated some type of activity that was against my terms of service.

Oh, and Google took back all the money that was in my account.

No explanation for exactly what the offending activity was. The email told me I couldn't reply to the automated email, that I could only appeal the decision to cancel my account through a contact form on the Google Adsense website. The form in question had a required field disabled, again making contact impossible.

Did I mention that Google took all my money?

A somewhat testy note sent to Google's press office resulted in another automated email a couple of days later reaffirming that I'd been canned by Google and I wouldn't be allowed back. No mention of giving me my money back, either. In other words: "You just spent the last few months serving our ads for free. So long sucka! Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!"

I'm not the only one who's had this experience. See here and here for a couple of good blog posts. This article by Benjamin Cohen on the Times of London website gives an excellent account of this and other questionable practices by Google's Adsense program. Anyone else have a tale of woe? Post it here.

Seems to me Google's looking at a class action lawsuit when the number of us stiffed Web publishers reaches a critical mass. In the meantime, Cohen notes that Yahoo!'s ad-serving program comes with the "right to speak to a real human being, 24/7."

Bigelow Aerospace jumping straight to manned habitats

I've just had word from Bigelow Aerospace, now at work on the first commercial space station in Las Vegas, that the company will leapfrog its next planned test module and skip right to its first habitable space station.

That's exciting news for anyone who's been following the company's recent successes--two uncrewed test modules now in orbit and performing flawlessly. These guys are making commercial spaceflight look easy.

The previous schedule called for the first commercial space station up by 2012. No word yet on when the habitable Sundancer module will launch under the new plan, except this statement from company head Robert Bigelow via press release:

"With this decision made, the future of entrepreneurial, private sector-driven space habitats and complexes could be arriving much earlier than any of us had previously anticipated."

DEKA's prosthetic arm

I've been here in Anaheim, California for the every-18-month DARPA Technology Symposium put on by the Pentagon's mad scientist department. There's Chuck Hildreth modeling a DARPA-funded prosthetic arm built by DEKA Research, the company run by Segway inventor Dean Kamen
.
This is the arm's first public appearance, and it, along with prosthetics being developed for the same program by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab (APL), stole the show.

Using a couple of joysticks, one operated by Hildreth's stump, the other in his right shoe, Hildreth demonstrated how he can operate a drill, pick up and eat M&M's one at a time, and shake hands.

Those little hoses on his belt feed air to a set of bladders in Hildreth's harness, continuously adjusting the arm's fit and the way its 9-pound weight is distributed across Hildreth's back and shoulders in response to the arm's movements.

Hildreth told me the system is extremely comfortable, and relatively easy to use. He'd been working with it for a total of 30 hours, and he already seemed quite proficient at using it.

DARPA Urban Challenge semi-finalists, location announced

DARPA director Tony Tether has just released the list of 36 teams that made it into the semi-finals for the Urban Challenge for autonomous vehicles capable navigating through city streets with other moving traffic. List here:

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp

The event will be held at the military urban training facility at Victorville, CA on November 3.

Makes sense that it wouldn't be held in a populated city.

More updates soon as I finish up the last day here at the DARPA Technology Symposium in Anaheim, California.

DARPA

I've just finalized the deal on my next book project for Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. The new book, to be completed in about a year, will focus on the blue sky technologies advanced by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Kicking off the project, I have the top story on wired.com today, about a DARPA project to build a prosthetic arm that's as fully functional as a native arm. That's project engineer and test subject Jonathan Kuniholm in my photo at work on the arm's software at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab.

Today through Thursday I'm at the DARPA Technology Symposium in Anaheim, California, where DARPA program managers, engineers working on DARPA-funded projects, and mad scientists from all over the country are meeting to figure out how to turn science fiction into science fact.

The exhibit hall hasn't even opened yet, and already my mind has been blown by talk of plants that can grow hydrogen as a cheap power source, the effort to define how the brain thinks with new forms of mathematics, and programmable materials that can morph to form any product imaginable.

Stay tuned for updates.

Wired.com top story

I have the front page of Wired.com today, with an article on the effect of last week's accident at Scaled Composites on the NewSpace industry.

Check out the comments area for a statement from future space passenger Reda Anderson.

There's also an excerpt from my book Rocketeers detailing Brian Binnie's X PRIZE-winning flight in SpaceShipOne and a photogallery of pictures from the book.

A bad day at Scaled Composites

An explosion during a test of rocket engine compenents by SpaceShipTwo builder Scaled Composites claimed the lives of three Scaled employees and seriously injured three others yesterday, according to various reports.

This is sure to set back the SpaceShipTwo program, and casts a pall on the entire industry.

Those of us in and around the commercial space industry have known from day one that deaths were inevitable during the opening of the final frontier, but that doesn't make it any easier to take.

My heart goes out to the good people at Scaled Composites and their families. I pray for a speedy recovery for those injured, and I offer that those who who died did not do so in vain. They were working to uplift all of humanity, and I very deeply appreciate their sacrifice. They are my heroes.

--Update at 2:12 p.m. ET--
We're doing updates on the Popular Science website at www.popsci.com as more information becomes available.

Book signings, podcasts, and a review

Back from Washington, where I launched my book Rocketeers at the National Air & Space Museum and the NewSpace 2007 conference. There's me signing books at the museum's Udvar-Hazy center at Dulles Airport. Larry Lowe, writer for Air & Space Smithsonian, took the picture.

C-SPAN taped the talk I gave at the museum's National Mall location before my signing there on Friday. Should be on C-SPAN2's Book TV in a couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, HarperCollins has posted some podcasts I recorded about the book, including a complete synopsis told in six minutes.

And the August Wired has a review of the book giving it eight out of ten stars.

On C-SPAN at National Air & Space Museum

Just heard that C-SPAN will tape my upcoming talk and reading at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum for Book TV on S-SPAN2. The show bills itself as "Top Nonfiction Authors Every Weekend." Hey! That must be me!

If you're going be in Washington, DC for the NewSpace 2007 conference this week, or if you're there anyway, come on over to the museum this Friday, July 20, at 3:00 p.m.

That's the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What a great way to celebrate--among some of the most historically important air- and spacecraft in the world, including the Apollo 11 command module and SpaceShipOne, which started the personal spaceflight revolution chronicled by my book Rocketeers.

The book isn't officially published until July 31, but the museum gift shop will sell copies in advance for me to sign in honor of Apollo 11 and the space conference.

I was originally slated to read in the gift shop, but since the TV crew is coming, the museum is going to rope off a gallery for me and whoever wants to check it out.

I'll be at the museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport to talk and sign again on Sunday, July 22 at 1:00 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Responder

Back from Huntsville and a visit with Orion Propulsion, led by Tim Pickens. Some highlights:

--Barbeque at the Pickens residence. The Pickens clan gathered for burgers and hot dogs (I brought the veggie burgers), Volkswagen-tinkering, rocket truck tours, and hybrid suitcase rocket demos.

--Orion's a profitable, $2-million company owned by its main engineers, with no investors. It's poised to expand significantly. If NASA selects Boeing to build the Ares 1 upper stage, Orion will build maneuvering and roll control thrusters for the system. NASA expects to choose between the Boeing team and one led by Alliant Techsystems next month.

--Last month, Orion was awarded a contract from the Army to build a rocket called Responder: 22 pounds to low Earth orbit that can be launched for under $1 million on a moment's notice from a portable pad. Pickens envisions hundreds of pop-up satellites transforming the satellite launch industry.

--Speaking of vision, Pickens moved me and filmmaker Mark Greene to tears as we taped an interview with him at Orion. He spoke of his and his 15-year-old daughter's dream to fly to space, and he told us how he started Orion by selling rocket parts on eBay. If I can do this, you can too, he said. Pickens is at once disarmingly down-home in his presentation and powerfully eloquent, a winning combination.

Mark and I hope to have video to post in the next couple of weeks.

---
Correction on 7/16/07 at 2:14 PM ET

Tim Pickens phoned me just now to clarify that his contract for Responder is just for a study by way of Colsa Corporation, not direct from the Army, and not for actually building the system.

Towering inferno

Here I am at the Saturn test stand at Marshall Space Flight Center. This stand was built to test the cluster of five 1.5 million-pound-thrust F-1 engines that powered the moon rocket.

It's 310 feet to the top. From up there you can see all of Huntsville. Rocketeer Tim Pickens pointed out the mountain ridge 10 miles away where his family home shook on its foundations when a test-fire was in progress.

The stand saw duty testing Space Shuttle Main Engines and then Atlas rockets before falling silent in the late 1990s. Engineers are refurbishing it for NASA's new moon shot.

This place is holy ground for rocketeers. Wernher von Braun, architect of project Apollo, rode the very elevator that took us to the top, walked these scaffolds. Pickens says he still gets a buzz off the energy of the place.

Booming with Orion Propulsion

Greetings from Rocket City, Huntsville, Alabama. I'm here with filmmaker Mark Greene shooting video at Tim Pickens' company Orion Propulsion.

After watching a tank burst test Orion did for NASA, we headed out to a cotton field near the airport to see the crew light up the 2,700-pound-thrust hybrid rocket engine Pickens built for his pickup truck.

That test was for Miltec, which wanted to test their engine health sensors in, er, field conditions. Why'd you pick Orion for this, I asked one of the Miltec guys. "They do about the fastest turn-around in the business," without cutting corners, he said.

Today it's off to Marshall Space Flight Center for a look at the historic test stands and then more interviews at Orion.

Rocketplane in freefall?

From the OKG News on Friday: "Rocketplane's XP, a suborbital tourism vehicle meant to take off from the Oklahoma Spaceport in Burns Flat, is in a funding free fall, according to the project's former chief engineer."

That's David Urie, who left Rocketplane Kistler in May. According to the article, he says the company diverted its resources to its Kistler division to support NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.

I'm waiting for word from the Rocketplane folks on their side of the story.

Personally, I'd like to see companies like Rocketplane Kistler tell NASA "Thanks but no thanks," and focus on true entrepreneurial spaceflight without government interference. But with the space agency throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at small companies like this the temptation to take it is just too great.

Problem is, whoever pays the bills makes the rules, and NASA's commitment is clearly to the big, mainline aerospace contractors building the next moon ship. Something like $100 billion over the life of that program, as opposed to a mere half a billion for COTS.

While I'd like to remain optimistic, $100 billion talks a lot louder than 0.5% of that. Yes, COTS and Project Constellation will perform two different missions, but both are to send people to orbit, and as Robert Heinlein famously pointed out, that's half the battle for any space mission. If successful, COTS would render at least half of Constellation redundant at a tiny fraction of the price. Is Big Aerospace really going to allow that?

Rocketeers TV

On Tuesday I'm heading to Rocket City USA, Huntsville, Alabama, with filmmaker Mark Greene to shoot video with rocketeer Tim Pickens. Tim plans to test fire a hybrid rocket engine and then we'll get a tour of his rocket shop and visit the historic test stands at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

The stuff at Marshall is closed to the public, so I'm looking forward to getting a look at (and filming) locations that rarely get attention. Tim tells me there's a Saturn 1-B booster lying on the ground next to the test stand, just where engineers left it after a test-fire forty-some years ago. Amazing.

Mark got so excited about my book Rocketeers early on that he wants to pitch it as a TV show to cable networks. To do that properly, we'll need to put together a pilot, which is where Tim comes in. Whether or not the full 13-episode series comes to be, we'll have some great footage to post here, on my site, and elsewhere.

I'll blog on location. Stay tuned.

More pics from Bigelow's Genesis II

That's Robert Bigelow's granddaughter's name on the outside of the ship. An out-of-this-world present to her, according to Leonard David.


In this interior shot, you can just make out some snapshots floating around in the background. Presumably this is a test of the Fly Your Stuff program, in which members of the public, including yours truly, submitted images and small objects to be flown on the ship.

Genesis II is a sub-scale test version of the full-up space station modules Bigelow Aerospace is building as part of the first commercial space station program. The ship joined Genesis I in orbit on June 28.

Signed copies of Rocketeers on my website

I've just put up a shopping cart at michaelbelfiore.com. You can order signed copies my forthcoming book Rocketeers there for no extra charge. I'll ship advance orders on publication day, July 31.

On The Space Show

Tune in tomorrow, July 2 to hear me talk about my forthcoming book Rocketeers on Dr. David Livingston's The Space Show at www.thespaceshow.com, 2-3:30 Pacific Time. If you're in the Seattle area, tune in to KKNW, 1150 AM.

Dr. Livingston is the radio show host for the NewSpace community, exceptionally well-informed and extremely thoughtful in his questions (as are his listeners). He's been reading a prepublication galley of my book, so we'll have a lot to talk about.

First images from Genesis II

This just in from Bigelow Aerospace. The second of the company's inflatable test modules went into orbit from Russia today and beamed back this pic, which confirms successful deployment of the craft's solar panels.

Not much to look at yet, but there's more sure to come. Stay tuned for a statement from Robert Bigelow, too.

Bigelow's making rapid progress toward sending up the first commercial space station. Can't wait to see NASA's reaction to the ship that will instantly render the International Space Station obsolete at a fraction of the cost.

NewSpace 2007 developments

Just heard from the organizers of the NewSpace 2007 conference that I'm to chair a panel discussion on commercial access to orbit. The panel has a great line-up, with more to come: http://www.space-frontier.org/Events/NewSpace2007/. Scroll down for the listing for Saturday, July 21. We go on at 9:45 a.m. This will mark my public speaking debut on the topic of my forthcoming book Rocketeers.

I've also been promised an exhibit table, which will be a great place for me bring the discussion from the panel when we run out of time there. I'll bring some advance copies of the book for folks to check out. I might be able to preview a new project I'm working on too. More on that soon....

California wildfire seen from Genesis

This just in from Bigelow Aerospace: the company's Genesis I satellite shot this view of Los Angeles and the Channel Islands last Friday, when wildfires threatened resort communities on Catalina Island.

You can see the smoke plume emanating from the island at the lower right of the photo. Click to see a bigger view.

Bigelow Aerospace is currently the only NewSpace company in orbit, with another launch planned for later this month. Genesis I and Genesis II are trial balloons--really--for the first commercial space stations. Both the test satellites and the full-scale stations are designed to be inflated from a compressed state when they reach orbit, thus saving space on launch and allowing for larger stations than is possible with conventional rigid designs.

Rocketeers reading at the National Air & Space Museum

It's a dream come true for me--the chance to talk and sign books at the permanent home of SpaceShipOne. I'll be at the National Air & Space Museum's gift shop on the National Mall on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, July 20, from 3 to 5 p.m.

This is a pre-release event in tandem with the NewSpace 2007 conference, where the book will go on sale for the first time.

Next day, I'm to moderate a panel discussion with some of the rocketeers featured in my book at the conference. The details for that are still being worked out, so stay tuned.

Finally, on July 20, I'll read from the book and sign at the Air & Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport. That museum features a Burt Rutan-designed VariEze, the airplane that launched Rutan's career. The VariEze led directly to Rutan's design for SpaceShipOne, and that's one of the things I'll talk about.

You can keep tabs on these and my other upcoming appearances at my website: www.michaelbelfiore.com.

Rocketeers launching at NewSpace 2007

It's official: my forthcoming book, Rocketeers, will launch at the Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2007 conference. The conference runs July 18-21 in Washington, DC, more than a week before the book's release to stores. Conference-goers will have the first opportunity to buy the book.

The Space Frontier Foundation is one of the premier organizations boosting commercial spaceflight, so this is the perfect place for my book launch.

The lineup of conference speakers so far includes Apollo moonwalker Edgar Mitchell, Ed White, author of the influential book The Overview Effect, Virgin Galactic chief pilot Alex Tai, Rocketplane Kistler Passenger Number One Reda Anderson, the FAA official in charge of commercial spaceflight, Patti Grace Smith, and lots of other prominent folks in this burgeoning industry.

Smithsonian Books will donate pre-release copies of my book to the Space Frontier Foundation, which means that 100 percent of the proceeds from sales of the book will support the foundation. I'll be doing signings at the conference and participating in other activities still to be finalized.

The supply of books at the conference will be limited, so midway through the conference, on Friday, July 20, I'll be doing a reading and signing at the National Air & Space Museum, just a couple of Metro stops away. Stay tuned for more on that.

Rocketeers excerpt

I have an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Rocketeers, up at the newly revamped michaelbelfiore.com.

Check it out and let me know what you think (yes, that's Tim Pickens riding his rocket bike). Let me know what you think of the new site too.

Zero-g super powers

I spoke this weekend with lunalight4r5d, the winner of the $75,100 eBay auction for last Thursday's zero-g flight with physicist Stephen Hawking. Lunalight4r5d, who wishes to remain anonymous, gave me the best endorsement of the zero-g experience I've heard yet.

"It's not really like being weightless in water," she said. "Water has its own weight. You're still experiencing something like a pressure. But this is the feeling of no pressure." Going weightless made her realize "how rarely we experience an entirely new physical sensation over your whole body, and that was just so different. I couldn't have really anticipated what it would feel like."

In fact, she said, it wasn't until she got back on the ground that she "understood the magic" of the experience. "It was like I had gained this momentary super power that I couldn't access any more. I felt like I should be able to just launch off the ground and go flying across the hotel lobby."

Like flying in a dream, Zero-G Corp. founder Peter Diamandis has described the weightless experience, and lunalight4r5d agreed.

In dreams, we're pure spirit, freed of the constraints of our bodies. For Hawking, unable to move most of his body because of a degenerative nerve disease, the difference between free fall and life under gravity seems more pronounced. But, really, his is the fate we all share: shackled to the ground, barely able to lift ourselves.

Hawking and other visionaries have said that we must settle space if we're to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, and that may be true. But their space dream is equally inspired by the desire to set free the human spirit.

Lunalight4r5d comes from a family of philanthropists, and the eBay auction presented an irresistible opportunity to support the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, one of her favorite charities.

Sharing the Zero-G flight with one of this century's greatest minds pushed an already sublime experience into the realm of the surreal. "I really almost felt like I was a person reading about it in some history book in the future. The red apple floating around as a tribute to Isaac Newton, and just connecting him to the greats of history," she said of Hawking, "that was the most phenomenal experience."

Rocketeers off to the printers

Okay, well, not quite, but my role in creating the book is over, and now it's up to the production department at Smithsonian Books to input my final, handwritten changes to the layout, and ship it to the printer. My editor hopes to have bound galleys ready for reviewers by May 1, and then it goes on sale August 1.

Of course, my work is far from over. In fact, some would say it's just begun. Next comes promoting the book, which will mean doing lots of interviews and trying to get as many media impressions as I can.

Step one is to launch a revamped website at www.michaelbelfiore.com. I'll have excerpts, blurbs from advance readers, my schedule of appearances, and lots of other goodies. Stay tuned.

Destination Space

Looks like the Virgin Group has beat me to the punch with a commercial spaceflight book out a few months in advance of my Rocketeers.

I don't consider this book a true competitor, though, since it's published by one of the main players in the commercial spaceflight arena and apparently keeps its focus on that company's activities.

In that light, it's possible to see this as more of a public relations piece than as a work of journalism. Can anyone who has seen the book correct me if I'm wrong? Comments welcome!

My book is unaffiliated with any of the NewSpace companies and thus avoids any conflicts of interest. It also covers a broad range of endeavors, not just one.

When last I checked, I was still the only author of a book on this subject to report firsthand not only on the work of Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, but also on SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Rocketplane Kistler, Armadillo Aerospace, and many others, to present the first comprehensive view of the birth of commercial spaceflight.

From the latest Virgin Galactic newsletter, released Friday:

"Read all about the amazing Galactic story in Virgin Books' new publication 'Destination Space', which features Virgin Galactic.

Award winning writer Kenny Kemp, goes in search of the story behind the first commercial space flight, discovering the major players in the race and the science, business and politics behind this incredible breakthrough. At the centre of the story are the paying passenger astronauts who have demonstrated their passion and commitment to the project."

The book is available now in the U.K., and is scheduled for release in the U.S. on May 29.

Stay tuned for more news of Rocketeers.

Flying high with Stephen Hawking

How much is a zero gravity ride with the world's greatest physicist worth? $75,100, says the winner of an auction that just closed on eBay.

All of the proceeds will go to Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation. eBay member lunalight4r5d will enjoy hotel accommodations, dinner with Professor Hawking, and of course that weightless flight on Zero-G Corp.'s Boeing 727. The ship flies parabolic arcs to let passengers experience lunar, Martian, and zero gravity. The flight will take place on April 26.

No word yet on lunalight4r5d's secret identity.

The Astronaut Farmer

If you're at all interested in the current, real-world efforts to build private spaceships, you'll be disappointed by this movie about an aerospace engineer/rancher building his own ride to space. Filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish didn't do their homework on what it actually takes to build a private spaceship, and the film suffers mightily for it.

Michael Polish describes his inspiration for the film this way in an interview on the Smithsonian Air & Space website:

"One day I walked into Mark’s room and said, 'Wouldn’t it be a neat idea if a guy built a rocket in his barn?” It was that simple. I might have been watching space programs or something on the Discovery Channel.'"

An even neater idea would be to visit one or two people actually building rockets in their barns, garages, or airplane hangars, or hire one of them as an expert adviser. Without this kind of basic research the film looks like someone's vague idea of what such a project might look like, rife with silly misconceptions.

For instance the plot turns on the FBI moving in to shut the astronaut down before he can launch because he tries to obtain "high-test rocket fuel," thus creating a national security threat. Apparently the filmmakers didn't know that rocket fuel is nothing more than kerosene, and not much to get excited about.

Not only the FBI, but also the CIA, NASA, and the FAA, all take a such an interest in the project that they bother to send representatives (including the heads of the FAA and the CIA) to the astronaut's small town in Texas to interrogate him in a high school gymnasium. During a break in the proceedings, the CIA head threatens the astronaut in the men's room, saying he'll bomb the astronaut and his ranch to bits if he tries to launch.

You only have to search on Google for "private spaceflight" to know that homebuilt spaceships got real back in 2004 and that everyone and his mother are building their own spaceships now, no intimidation by the FAA, the CIA, or any other "A" required.

That the Polish brothers missed that is a real shame because their film perpetuates the myth that the government will allow only the government to send people into space and that private spaceflight is only one or two people's crazy dream with little relevance for everyone else.

An excellent cast, including Billy Bob Thornton as the citizen-astronaut, and Bruce Willis as a NASA astronaut, lend a little shine to an otherwise deeply flawed film. In particular, Thornton's speech to his interrogators about the importance in believing you can do anything you set your mind to, and a monologue from Willis on the overview effect almost, but not quite, make the movie worth watching.

--
Update on 2/26/07

Some in the private space community are more forgiving of the film than I. Check out some enthusiastic comments from XCOR Aerospace test pilot Rick Searfoss and Space Frontier Foundation cofounder Rick Tumlinson at Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log.

Rocketeers new cover

Rocketeers
Originally uploaded by mpbelfiore.

I spoke too soon when I said the cover for my forthcoming commercial spaceflight book was finalized. Turns out a certain high-volume bookseller thought it lacked punch, so the designers went back to the drawing board and came up with this one.

The artwork, by Nick Kaloterakis, is from the February 2006 cover of Popular Science, illustrating my story on the Rocket Racing League.

I like the book jacket a lot; it looks like a retro science fiction book cover, which is completely appropriate, since the book is about old-time science fiction coming true.

Blue Origin posts test flight pics, videos

This just went up today, on the freshly-revamped site of spaceship startup Blue Origin.

Blue Origin is run and financed by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, and it's been maintaining media silence since its inception.

These pictures and videos from a test flight conducted on November 13 in West Texas leave no doubt about the seriousness of the company's plans to send commercial astronauts into space in a vertical takeoff/vertical landing rocket ship.

From the looks of the videos, the test vehicle could have easily won last year's Lunar Lander Challenge, for which Armadillo Aerospace competed and failed to win.

A Blue Origin media rep confirmed for me by email that the new material was posted today, but that no one at the company is doing interviews. Poor guy. Hope he has other clients to attend to.

--update on 1/4/07--
Robin Snelson points out on Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log that the test vehicle's probable hydrogen peroxide fuel would make it ineligible for competition in the Lunar Lander Challenge.