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Entering space.
The author of the international bestseller "The case for Mars" brings us to brink of human exploration in this visionary yet practical blueprint of how we can settle new planets and reach new stars.
Using nuts-and bolts engineering and a unique grasp of human history, the man celebrated as the "Tom Paine of Space" brings us to the not-very-distant future, when our global society win branch out to become a spacefaring one. From current day prospect of lunar bases and Mars settlement to the colonization of the galaxy, engineer and space visionary delivers the most important and forward-looking work on space and the true possibilities of human exploration since Carl Sagan's "Cosmos".
Sagan said of Zubrin's own humans-to-Mars plan, "Bob Zubrin, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue". Now Zubrin takes us further, into the prospect of human expansion to outer planets of our solar system and beyond.
In Entering Space, Zubrin surveys :
- How the race for new satellite-launch technology is giving birth to a more economical, reusable form of rocketry that will be able to carry more people into space more inexpensively than ever before.
- How Mars represents humanity's next home, offering an ideal and compelling locale for the first colonization of space and launching pad for deeper settlement and exploration.
- How asteroids represent one of the greatest opportunities for mining and other forms of space commerce - but also pose a potential threat to life on our own planet.
- How rocket planes, solar and magnetic sails, controlled fusion, and other technologies stand untapped as unique resource that will allow us to be more mobile and to reach father into stars than we have ever dreamed.
- How humans will meet the challenges of terraforming other worlds, interstellar travel, and eventually contact with other intelligent species.
These are just a few of the themes in a book already being celebrated as the manifesto of a new area in space travel and exploration. "After reading it" say's bestseller author Kim Stanley Robinson", you have a clearer idea than before of where you stand in the universe."
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