Customer Reviews

Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space

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For anyone who, as a kid, sat enthralled in front of the television watching men walk on the moon, or anyone interested in where space travel may be heading in the future, this is the book for you. I stumbled across it accidentally on its first day of publication and finished it the next. Belfiore does a great job covering the landscape of current commercial space projects and the entrepreneurs trying to open space to all. I've read about many of the companies covered in the book before, but Belfiore provides a deeper insight into the fascinating people behind the companies and their dreams for space travel. Belfiore has a clean writing style that makes for a fast-paced read. The book ends with a bit of speculative fiction about what might develop in the future from these commercial space endeavors. If only a tenth of it comes true, I hope I'm around to see it.

I recently spent a few days at a NASA facility with a group of teachers. I asked them the same question that Robert Bigalow asks in the book, "What is America's inspiration today?" They didn't have an answer. Neither did I. And I didn't see an answer during my NASA visit. NASA is doing some great things with what they have, but they seem a somewhat demoralized by the fickleness of political support and funding. Who can blame them? Surrounded by mothballed and rusting test stands and equipment, it certainly wasn't the NASA of my youth or the Apollo program.

However, the commercial space guys seem to be a breed of their own. A group of dreamers, entrepreneurs and space buffs, some using their own money, trying to open space to regular folks. I think the commercial space pioneers described in the book could provide the excitement and possibly the inspiration we desperately need in this country. Sure, it's a long shot, but I think it might be the best one we have. I'm looking forward to it.

Fairly short and easy to read magazine-style investigative-journalistic
human interest narrative about some of the exciting people and companies
involved in America's burgeoning private space industry: the X Prize,
Burt Rutan, Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow and a few others.
I thought the best chapters were about Burt Rutan and winning the
XPrize, in particular the blow by blow account of all the troubles they
had, very edge of the seat; also the backgrounds of Elon Musk and Robert
Bigelow. As a journalistic work it is ephemeral and will be outdated
(except as a source for later writers) but if your fascinated by
the events, people and rocket ships, this is an excellent overview valuable right now,
it's still too early to write the history. Belfiore writes for a number of periodicals like
Popular Science, Wired, New Scientists, and claims to be one of only a
few who are covering this exciting new industry, so he will certainly be
an author to watch in the years ahead.

What a great book on the future of private space! I hope the author will
write "Rocketeers 2.0" real soon. Looking forward to following his career as a free-lance author. His contacts in the infant civilian rocket sector will pay major dividends for valuable future history of the civilian rocket boom years

Finally the Americans we (foreigners) have all admired in the past, are coming back to life. This book is a well written "easy read", about American entrepreneurs doing what Americans do best ... inspire the rest of us with new exciting things e.g. (almost) affordable space flight for all.
It doesn't get too bogged down in technicalities, but gives you a nice insiders view of these small companies and the people in them.
Read this book to give you inspiration or just to cheer yourself up ... after watching the latest TV newsreal about the latest multi-million dollar "precision guided munitions" destroying some simple schmucks in a cave in who-knows-where ...

To cut to the chase, if you want to buy a book on the private space industry this year, buy Rocketeers by Michael Belfiore. It is a brilliant look at the recent history of private companies trying to get into space and make a dollar by someone who was at ground zero. It is an easy read for anyone regardless of technical background.

For those of you who interested in more detail, Rocketeers starts out at the second X-Prize flight of SpaceShipOne, as Mr. Belfiore takes us from the VIP section at Mojave back through the Apollo era at NASA and its effect on him. I identified with his excitement and later disappointment at where NASA took us in space.

He follows the history of the X-Prize starting with Peter Diamandis' ingénues idea to have a prize for going to space. All this leads up to a word picture of what it felt like to see Brian Binnie break the 62-mile invisible wall into space. This marks the beginning of the modern private space age.

Rocketeers takes us to an in-depth peek into most of the major private space companies. He talks with the visionaries and engineers (and even passengers) from the most successful businesses, such as SpaceX, to ill-fated endeavors, like the da Vinci Project and everyone in-between including Bigelow Aerospace, RocketPlane, the Rocket Racing League, and Virgin Galactic. Moreover, he looks at each of these without judgment on their chance of success or importance. He simply reports what they are doing and why and lets the reader decide who is worth watching.

Before you accuse me of taking bribes from Harper Collins or Mr. Belfiore, there are some less than perfect parts of the book. First, the flow-of-consciousness science fiction style Mr. Belfiore uses, while working very well for a first pass through, makes it a little difficult to go back and find some tidbit of info to impress your friends.

I would highly recommend Rocketeers for anyone interested where the next 50 years of space travel is going.

If you grew up in the 60s or 70s, if you ever thought you might accompany Haywood Floyd on his Pan Am jet into orbit in 2001, if you ever ate Space Food Sticks or drank Tang, if you ever wondered what the hell happened to the space program, and what humanity's next step into the final frontier might look like, Rocketeers is a must read book.

Like Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff", I found I couldn't put Rocketeers down. It brought back my own memories of what Belfiore calls "the first space age," as it sets the stage for today, the dawn of the second space age. The visionaries, the entrepeneurs and business people making the second space age a reality are our contemporaries. Many of these people assumed, as did so many of us, that after Apollo, a boom of private space activity would propel thousands, perhaps millions, of people into life in orbit, or on the moon.

I'm not a libertarian, and I confess that I've always resisted the analysis that NASA is to blame for the end of the first space age. With no political axe to grind, Belfiore has converted me to this school of thought. What the Rocketeers have managed to do, creating reusable, working craft carrying people into space, has been accomplished with the money NASA might have devoted to developing a zero-gravity menstrual pad.

Belfiore's historical comparisons with the development of comercial aviation, and the importance of Charle's Limberg's trans-atlantic flight, came as nothing short of a revelation. Lindberg crossed the Atlantic with no new technology, no government hand out, with nothing but courage, his own experience as an aviator--and the promise of a cash prize.

Belfiore's illumenation of the development of the X-prize, and it's capture by the Space Ship One team brought me the chill's that reading Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo did as a 12 year old.

In short, this book gave me a hope for the future of humanity that I haven't had since I was a teenager.

I can count on the fingers of one hand books that have done that for me in the last decade.

Now that everyone seems to be criticising NASA, with much justification people are looking for alternatives. Privatizations is one such option. I have no doubt that it could be a good option.

However although this book had some interesting stories which I quite enjoyed I am yet to see much evidence for any real results for this privatizations for example, Virgin Galactic always seems to be only a few years to go.

A fun, engaging and a bit scattershot look at the visionaries trying to jump start the private space flight business. The book already needs serious updating as many of the companies and projects featured have died, morphed into something else, are still struggling to hit oft-delayed schedules or, in a case or two, have accomplished major goals. Belfiore has successfully captured many of the personalities involved and does an excellent job explaining the technologies involved as well.

I found the book informative and the topic definitely interesting, but the way the story is told leaves me with an oddly disjointed feeling which I suppose reflects the state of the private space industry. There is no denying the author's interest and enthusiasm, but the book tries to navigate a middle path between detail and characters, and ends up slighting both.

This book is a rather basic introduction to NewSpace ideas and people. Private space flight is an exciting subject and if you are new to it, you will probably enjoy the book. Covered in some depth are: the history of XPrize and Peter Diamandis, SpaceShipOne / Scaled Composites / Burt Rutan, Richard Branson / Virgin Galactic, NASA and private spaceflight, SpaceX / Falcon / Elon Musk, Rocketplane, XCOR, Bigelow's orbital hotels, commercial spaceports. However, the author seems to be more interested in telling amusing stories ("...Suddenly Burt Rutan was wide awake, staring into the blackness of his bedroom ceiling. Out of the blackness came a spaceship in free fall... "I've got it" he said aloud...") than in the technical/scientific aspects of spaceflight. It was also disappointing to me that there are very few pictures in the book and those present are not very relevant (e.g. I'd prefer a cross-section drawing of a hybrid rocket motor to the photo of Tim Pickens riding his rocket bicycle). The book was written in 2007, so naturally you won't find there any of the newest advances in the field: the Lunar Landing Challenge (and its participants), the Space Elevator games, the first successful flight of SpaceX's Falcon 1, SpaceX's Dragon capsule, Google's Lunar Challenge. You will find much more detailed and up-to-date information just reading various NewSpace-related news sites, blogs and Wikipedia articles.