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...

From a former senior advisor to Senator John McCain comes an urgent wake-up call about how new technologies are threatening America's military might.For generations of Americans, our country has been the world's dominant military power. How the US military fights, and the systems and weapons that it fights with, have been uncontested. That old reality, however, is rapidly deteriorating. America's traditional sources of power are eroding amid the emergence of new te...

Can astronauts reach Mars by 2035? Absolutely, says Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men to walk on the moon. Celebrated astronaut, brilliant engineer, bestselling author, Aldrin believes it is not only possibly but vital to America's future to keep pushing the space frontier outward for the sake of exploration, science, development, commerce, and security. What we need, he argues, is a commitment by the U.S. President as rousing as JFK's promise to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s—an a...

The commercial airline industry is one of the most volatile, dog-eat-dog enterprises in the world, and in the late 1990s, Europe’s Airbus overtook America’s Boeing as the preeminent aircraft manufacturer. However, Airbus quickly succumbed to the same complacency it once challenged, and Boeing regained its precarious place on top. Now, after years of heated battle and mismanagement, both companies face the challenge of serving burgeoning Asian markets and stiff competition from China and Ja...

"Manu Saadia has managed to show us one more reason, perhaps the most compelling one of all, why we all need the world of Star Trek to one day become the world we live in." — Chris Black, Writer and Co-Executive Producer, Star Trek: EnterpriseWhat would the world look like if everybody had everything they wanted or needed? Trekonomics, the premier book in financial journalist Felix Salmon's imprint PiperText, approaches scarcity economics...

“Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue.”—Carl Sagan, The Denver PostIf you ever daydream about space travel and human space flight—or hope to one day rove the Red Planet alongside Curiosity—then MARS DIRECT will teach you how we can get thereThe human race is at a crossroads. In the coming decades, we will make decisions regarding our human spaceflight program that will lead to one of two familiar futu...

A former NASA deputy administrator recounts how she battled greed and corruption to revolutionize the agency and usher in a new space age.Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver's firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries overcame the political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency. The success of Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and countless other com...

Is there time to avoid humanity's extinction? Practically everything that has ever lived is extinct; we will be no exception unless we work very hard to be an exception. Wrestling with that problem led to a chilling, undeniable conclusion: the human species is ultimately doomed on Earth and we have no plan.The Earth will eventually become uninhabitable and moving people off Earth is the only credible survival alternative, short of some sort of intervention. The United Nations produ...

"Skillfully interweaving technical details and fascinating personalities, Johnson tells the history of systems management in the U.S. and Europe." —Howard McCurdy, author of Space and the American ImaginationWinner of the Emme Award for Astronautical Literature from the American Astronautical SocietyHow does one go about organizing something as complicated as a strategic-missile or space-exploration program? Stephen B. Johnson here...

An exploration of the changing conceptions of the Space Shuttle program and a call for a new vision of spaceflight.The thirty years of Space Shuttle flights saw contrary changes in American visions of space. Valerie Neal, who has spent much of her career examining the Space Shuttle program, uses this iconic vehicle to question over four decades' worth of thinking about, and struggling with, the meaning of human spaceflight. She examines the ideas, images, and icons...

If you are one of over 700 million passengers who will fly in America this year, you need to read this book. The Next Crash offers a shocking perspective on the aviation industry by a former United Airlines pilot. Weaving insider knowledge with hundreds of employee interviews, Amy L. Fraher uncovers the story airline executives and government regulators would rather not tell. While the FAA claims "This is the golden age of safety," and other aviation researchers a...

THE ANSWER TO AMERICA'S RENEWAL LIES DIRECTLY ABOVE US.The Gravity Well reveals an astronomical mystery while offering the best promise for our nation's future. What is the Gravity Well?A deep hole in space,A force that presses us to Earth,An obstacle stretching a million miles up and out, with us at the bottom,And our generation's most promising challenge.Conquering the Well offers our best hope for America's renewal―and, in the long run, for t...