Originally Posted by Mallaha:
“Question for the space and astronomy people: can you recommend me a good general, factual book about space travel? A mix of techy stuff and biography would be great, if such a thing exists.
I've looked on Amazon and the books I found all seem to be speculative, astrophysics textbooks, or only relating to certain missions.”
“Question for the space and astronomy people: can you recommend me a good general, factual book about space travel? A mix of techy stuff and biography would be great, if such a thing exists.
I've looked on Amazon and the books I found all seem to be speculative, astrophysics textbooks, or only relating to certain missions.”
Well, Mallaha, l have two recommendations and a suggestion for you.
Starting off with the history of space travel, l can recommend both Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff about the devlopment of the US space programme and Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon which specifically deals with the Apollo project.
ln terms of what's ahead, Licence to Orbit http://www.amazon.co.uk/License-Orbi...5949245&sr=8-1 from Apogee Books http://www.cgpublishing.com/Books/SPACE_SPLASH.html might do the trick but l've not read it myself.
Some interesting faster ways of getting around the Solar System are being developed such as the NERVA fission rocket engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA and the VASIMR [vassimir] plasma rocket engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variabl...oplasma_Rocket
However, in order to escape this Solar System, it's going to take something like an advanced helium-3 fusion pulse rocket or similar which could theoretically get up to 50% of the speed of light http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ce.html?page=1.
Even using that last option, it would still take at least 40 years to get to the newly discovered Gliese 581g planet! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11444022




