Lost in Space
The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age
-
- S/ 39.90
-
- S/ 39.90
Descripción editorial
The daring, revolutionary NASA that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon has lost its meteoric vision, says journalist and space enthusiast Greg Klerkx. NASA, he contends, has devolved from a pioneer of space exploration into a factionalized bureaucracy focused primarily on its own survival. And as a result, humans haven’t ventured beyond Earth orbit for three decades. Klerkx argues that after its wildly successful Apollo program, NASA clung fiercely to the spotlight by creating a government-sheltered monopoly with a few Big Aerospace companies. Although committed in theory to supporting commercial spaceflight, in practice it smothered vital private-sector innovation. In striking descriptions of space milestones spanning the golden 1960s Space Age and the 2003 Columbia tragedy, Klerkx exposes the “real” NASA and envisions exciting public-private cooperation that could send humans back to the moon and beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sprawling and sometimes polemical account, Klerkx, formerly associated with the SETI Institute, excoriates what he sees as NASA's present-day loss of vision. During the Apollo program, NASA's goal was manned space exploration. But over the last 29 years, the agency has scaled down its vision, content to send unmanned missions to the other planets and keep human beings in earth orbit with the short-lived Skylab, the troubled shuttle fleet and the "money-gobbling" International Space Station. Klerkx draws out some of the threads in the tangled web that connects the perpetually feuding NASA fiefdoms, NASA's major suppliers (and major congressional contributors), like Boeing, and the politicians who write the checks. He believes that private-sector entrepreneurs will wrest future space exploration away from the self-serving NASA bureaucracy, which too often views space in terms of military and strategic applications. Klerkx presents the nouveaux riches businessmen investing millions in space-related projects, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, as well as eccentric visionaries like Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society. The Columbia disaster hangs over Klerkx's tale like a dark shadow.. Some readers may think Klerkx is still under the spell of his boyhood dream of being an astronaut and giving short shrift to arguments against human space exploration. But readers who share Klerkx's dream will be captivated by his vision of what needs to be done to resume manned space flights and of what humankind is capable of achieving.
