The author of the international bestseller The Case for Mars ("ingenious" -- The New York Times Book Review) brings us to the brink of human exploration in this visionary yet practical blueprint of how we can settle new planets and reach new stars.
Using nuts-and-bolts engineering and a unique grasp of human history, the man celebrated as the "Tom Paine of space" brings us to the not-very-distant future, when our global society will branch out to become a spacefaring one. From the current-day prospect of lunar bases and Mars settlements to the colonization of the galaxy, engineer and space visionary Robert Zubrin delivers the most important and forward-looking work on space and the true possibilities of human exploration since Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
Sagan said of Zubrin's own humans-to-Mars plan, "Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue". Now Zubrin takes us further, into the prospect of human expansion to the outer planets of our solar system and beyond.
In Entering Space, Zubrin surveys:
-- How the race for new satellite-launch technology is giving birth to a more economical, reusable form of rocketry that will be able to carry more people into space more inexpensively than ever before.
-- How Mars represents humanity's next home, offering an ideal and compelling locale for the first colonization of space and a launching pad for deeper settlement and exploration.
-- How asteroids represent one of the greatest opportunities for mining and other forms of space commerce -- but also pose a potential threat to life on our own planet.
-- How rocket planes, solar and magnetic sails, controlled fusion, and other technologies stand untapped as unique resources that will allow us to be more mobile and to reach farther into the stars than we have ever dreamed.
-- How humans will meet the challenges of terraforming other worlds, interstellar travel, and eventual contact with other intelligent species.
These are just a few of the themes in a book already being celebrated as the manifesto of a new era in space travel and exploration. "After reading it", says bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson, "you have a clearer idea than before of where you stand in the universe".
