Skip to main content

The Space Business - Andrew May ****

When I was young, space travel was very exciting because science fiction was becoming reality. First there were people in space and then the landings on the Moon. However, there was one big difference between what I read in SF and what was happening on the news. Fictional space travel was largely a matter of private enterprise, whether it was down to the work of an individual mad scientist or a large corporation. But the reality left leaving Earth in the hands of two superpower nations. Of course, there were exceptions in the fiction, but even in something like Star Trek, where the central focus was a ship owned by supranational authorities, there were still plenty of privately owned ships in space.

Now, though, reality is catching up with the fiction. Companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin are bringing a whole new entrepreneurial flair to the design and build of rockets, outpacing the slow and steady approach of NASA. In The Space Business, Andrew May takes us on a tour of this new look at the way we interact with space - and discovers whether there are real commercial opportunities, or it's just an expensive hobby for science fiction loving billionaires.

Along the way, May ties neatly in with science fiction writers' visions of commercial space travel, from space hotels to asteroid mining. However, this is not a rose-tinted spectacles venture - from the very first there is an emphasis on the idea that 'space is hard' - it's easy to underestimate the difficulties both of getting out of Earth's gravitational well and surviving in that hostile environment.

The book splits the space business experience into suborbital ventures, getting satellites into orbit, space vacations, extraterrestrial industries and the billionaire space race. May makes it clear that the limiting factor on some of these activities - asteroid mining, for example - is likely to be the need for a huge upfront investment of time and money. 'The question is,' he asks, 'where are we going to find someone far-sighted enough – or naïve enough – to pick up the tab?' Enter those billionaires. 

At the time of writing there has been criticism both from the press and British royals (who ought to know better than to mention the matter of unnecessary expense) of the space ventures of tech billionaires - but that's potentially a shortsighted view. May looks at the drivers behind their different approaches, and highlights why Mars (despite its romantic appeal) is probably less realistic as a prospect for long-term human habitation than space habitats. In the end, though, he comes back to the importance of the space business for everything from navigation to monitoring the climate through that less romantic, but most significant aspect of satellite launching.

It's timely that this book has come out just when the 90-year-old William Shatner - the actor who brought Star Trek's Captain Kirk to life - has made a brief venture into space on a commercial spaceflight. There is something of the essence of Hollywood fakery about these flights that scrape the edge of space but don't really do anything. And yet there is also a feeling of opportunity in space now that hasn't existed since the days of the Apollo missions. 

This is a solid, straightforward guide to the prospects for commercial space activity from satellite launching to asteroid mining. The book makes it clear that if and when we do boldly go where no one has gone before, it is as likely to be on a commercial mission as one that is run by a government.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur