New Year, New Book

Since the release of Rocketeers last summer, I've been retooling for my next project, a book about DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm. And what a long arm it is, sponsoring technology research and development that effects our lives in ways most people can hardly imagine. The computer network you're connected to, for instance, started as a DARPA project.

Watch this space for updates on the shadowy world of military research, with an emphasis on tech that could help the rest of us. Clean, renewable energy, bionic arms, cars that drive themselves, hyperspeed jets, and more, are all part of DARPA projects. As in my last book, I'll introduce you to the engineers making it all happen and show you around their labs and workshops.

Among my resolutions: to blog several times a week. As I expand my focus to take in not just commercial space travel, but other science fiction coming true, I aim also to expand my audience beyond my core readership of space workers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, but anyone else interested in how advanced technology can help solve our Earthly problems. Not to worry if want to keep tabs on the world of commercial spaceflight--I'll keep up my coverage there too.

Along the way, I'll give you a glimpse into my own R&D process, offering what I hope will be an entertaining and informative view of the working writer's life.

I hope you'll join me on this next fantastic voyage. Meantime, pick up the current Popular Science for my cover story on hpersonic aircraft. Yes, it's a DARPA-funded project that could just change the world. Around the world in four hours, anyone?

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.