America’s Space Futures is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about space policy, the American space program, and the human destiny in space. It lays out alternative paradigms and frameworks for assessing America’s future in space and how different visions would require changes to America’s current approach to space development and exploration. Since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s, the U.S. civil space program has accomplished a great number of things: from deployi...

What is a spacefaring society, and how do we get there from here? In addressing these questions, this book examines how partisanship and parochialism have hindered American space dreams in recent years, and demonstrates that the lessons we should have learned from U.S. history can put us on a more productive path. Instead of being stuck in Stage One space development (space as a training ground), we can move more quickly to Stage Two (Earth-Moon space as an industrial park) and eventually ...