Customer Reviews

The Rocket Company (Library of Flight Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a case study for launching the exploitation of space through private means. It has a thin framing story in which the writer claims to be writing a history of a company that is developing a reusable launch vehicle for sale on the open market.

As a fictional business case study, it makes for very interesting reading. The author knows his rocket science and celestial mechanics and lays out his ideas very well. I saw an earlier reviewer's complaint over the use of imperial rather than metric units, but it does not distract from the reasoning.

For a book on space travel, this book is unique in my experience in the detail to which it analyses the business requirements needed to make the ideas work. The idea that the rocket company intends only to manufacture and sell the launch vehicle described in the book is a big departure from the sort of space advocacy books that have been published since the great retreat from the moon.

There are various technical decisions made in the design process described in the book that I have a problem with, but I'd guess that every reader will feel this way and that every reader's quibbles will be different. That's what happens whenever a truly interesting idea is discussed.

I wish more of the ideas presented in the proposed design had been summarized in graphs. Hopefully future printings of the book will expand the one graph at the end into a series of appendices for the technically inclined.

Highly recommended.

This book is promoted as a novel. It's much more than a novel -- it really is a primer of "rocket science." I'd rate it at least a 4 and 1/2 stars. I am a missile engineer with 27 years experience in the design and development of rockets and missiles. While most of my experience is with solid propellant missiles, I have a working knowledge of liquid rockets. Patrick tells it how it truly is. The book leads the reader through the classical trade-offs involved in designing a liquid-fueled payload-to-orbit rocket system. Not until the chapter suggesting the existence of a monestary on the moon did I come to appreciate that this is really fiction. I should acknowledge that I knew Patrick and worked with him on a single-stage-to-orbit system some 20 years ago. I have not had contact with him since then until I was alerted to the existence of this book by a friend we share in common.
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"The Rocket Company" is a really neat book. You'd never confuse it with great literature, though. After all, engineers, such as authors Patrick J. G. Stiennon and David M. Hoerr, are generally not known for writing scintillating prose. It's sort of a hybrid--a novel that reads like a technical report. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it definitely lacks a fast-paced narrative style to draw you into the story. What little dialogue there is reads like highly polished scripts rather than real conversations. However, if you make the effort to work your way through "The Rocket Company," you will receive, at no additional cost, an excellent, comprehensive introductory education in the fields of spacecraft engineering, production, test and operations. The authors lead you through the technical, management and financial processes involved in developing a (fictional) new, low-cost space launch system. You can't avoid learning a lot from them along the way.

Debates about the cheapest ways to put payloads into orbit go back to the beginning of the Space Age. The expendable launch vehicles that continue to dominate the field today clearly are not the answer--they are the equivalent of an airline flying a brand-new 747 on one transcontinental trip and then cutting up the airplane for scrap when it gets to its destination. The bill of goods that initially sold the Space Shuttle promised much cheaper access to space--that didn't happen. The men and women of "The Rocket Company" take the next step beyond the Space Shuttle. They develop a fully reusable launch vehicle that slashes the cost per pound to put payloads into orbit, and even makes money on the deal.

The authors are obviously devout space enthusiasts, as well as being exceptionally experienced and knowledgeable about all the topics they write about. Their enthusiasm and expertise shine through on every page. Unlike nearly all spaceflight books on the market today, "The Rocket Company" is remarkably free of technical errors (I only found one--Alexei Leonov's ship was a "Voskhod" [really just a modified "Vostok"], not a "Soyuz"). This really is how "rocket science" works. Judging from my own career in the aerospace industry, they get it right in every detail. By the way, the black-and-white pencil sketches in each chapter, by industrial designer Doug Birkholz, are also excellent. They remind me a bit of Syd Mead's work, which is high praise indeed.

Although I personally doubt that there's enough potential demand to justify a vehicle like the one Messrs. Stiennon and Hoerr postulate (and thus I doubt the central premise of the book), I still enjoyed "The Rocket Company" enormously. Sure, it's a little geeky, but it's packed from cover to cover with more accurate, reliable spaceflight information per page than you're likely to find in any other readily available source. If your eyes glaze over at such terms as "parametric analysis," "mass ratio" or "specific impulse," it may not be your cup of tea. But if you have the slightest interest in finding out how space technology really works, buy it, read it and learn from it--you won't regret it.

Buy this book now!
Although written back in 2005 or so, "The Rocket Company" still makes for compelling reading, especially at the current moment in time. Since the space program is undergoing another dramatic policy shift (and unless that shift includes a highly-unlikely lurch towards nuclear-particle bed propulsion), the design here may be the best option for space we'll see in our lifetime. While technical arguments sometimes eluded this lay reader at first, reading with an eye to understanding the material by researching what you *don't* understand is a great way to familiarize yourself with background for a commercial space project like this.
So, for armchair Elon Musks, this book is great fun, and a terrific resource. Now, if only we could get NASA (or Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or Universal Orlando, etc.) to fund a two-stage-to-orbit manned vehicle about this size, with about this payload, using about these performance specs... Ah, well, I guess there's no sense in hoping some company somewhere--say, one which made a great deal of money on the internet, had a visionary founder, that kind of thing--would attempt to build an orbital system like this...:-).

Do you wish to see what the future of space travel will be like? But sick of the artwork that does not seem to be realistic? Or sick of the sci-fi stories which seems to talk down to you? Want real engineers and pilots, not cowboys and comic book Heroes? Well, this is the book for you.
As you may notice, many have called it a fictional business plan for getting out there into space and in some ways that is true. But is also the nearest thing to a very realistic, hard science fiction story about getting into space. At first it may feel a tad slow but all the build up in the earlier chapters, all the details as the two stage rocket is designed, the funding collected and the future plotted out inch by inch, makes the later chapters easier to understand, as you are on the same page as the author, and make them go much faster.
It is not just all math and profit. There are a few wonderful drawings, lots of imagination, and even some humor. The end result is something hard sci-fi fans, like myself, not only can enjoy but it also promises ONE way that we can get off this planet, into space.
Because, if NASA can't do it, somebody else will have to.
If you enjoyed this book I would also suggest the anime Planetes: Complete Collection for its vision of the future. I would also suggest the following books, in no real order - Return to the Moon (Apogee Books Space Series), Space Stations, Space 2100: To Mars and Beyond in the Century to Come, Islands in the Sky: Bold New Ideas for Colonizing Space, Making Space Happen: Private Space Ventures and the Visionaries Behind Them, and World of 2044.

A must read for any aerospace participant. There are compelling ideas and some interesting technical approaches to the problem of developing a viable private space industry. Highly recommended.

The Rocket Company is well worth reading if you are a space nut. The authors are opinionated and don't really do justice to alternate ideas. Sometimes you get the feeling they are skipping over the hard parts. But they explore a lot of areas laymen don't think about, and that can be fun.

While this book is technically a novel, it reads more like a long, fictional HBS case. The characters and plot are unimportant. You are meant to read about the business and engineering and be interested in that. It's a book for nerds.

Technically, the book is so-so. The authors downplay testing. They push ultra-thin engineering margins. They introduce complexity where it seems unnecessary. It often seems like AMM (the rocket company) is doing things the hard way. Maybe these are literary tools used so that the authors can talk about their interests, but the reader is often left thinking "there's no way a rational company would do things that way or spend money on that". They approach business questions with a bit of wishful thinking. Regular VC discount rates do not apply. No real competitors will ever arise. To their credit they do at least think about business issues.

Good space books are thin on the ground. This one deals with a lot of the real complexity of an engineering company, and that makes it interesting. It's obviously timely, since numerous real companies are beginning to push into this world. If it was a book about any other topic, I'd give it three stars, but it's so unique in its depth and thought on this topic that I have to pump it up. In summary: It's a book for nerds. Mandatory reading for space nuts. Should not be taken as gospel.

a very good novel, disguised a introduction into spaceship design .. or vice versa.

however much i liked it, i have two points of critique:

1. quite obviously a lot of thought went into the design of the launcher .. however we do not see a lot of these off-stage thoughts. an expanded appendix covering this would have been much appreciated

2. why - oh why - was the decision made to use imperial measurements only? no metrical measurements (which are only used by about 97% of mankind) in sight - not even in parenthesis (as would be common in most technical literature ..

point 2 was for me the reason to give only 4 stars instead of 5

My brother did the illustrations so I of course think the book is great. The technical information is interesting to read.