THE SPACE BUSINESS
FROM HOTELS IN ORBIT TO MINING THE MOON
AUTHOR ANDREW MAY PUBLISHER ICON BOOKS PRICE £8.99 / $16.95 RELEASE OUT NOW
Now that Bezos, Musk and Branson have each put billions into private space ventures, sending wealthy tourists to the Kármán line in bespoke space planes and supplying NASA with rockets, the future’s pretty clear to the rest of us Earth-bound mortals. We can all imagine a future where we, as a spacefaring species, will be able to jump on a sightseeing tour around Mars, or stay in a lunar resort with the family and don a spacesuit, exiting the dome habitat and visiting a UNESCO space heritage site like the 1969 Apollo 11 landing zone in the Sea of Tranquillity.
Or, if that’s still too science fiction for you to swallow, low-orbit trips around Earth that are actually affordable to the average earner. Maybe some remote asteroid mining – and before you roll your eyes, that prospect is far from science fiction: we’ve already landed a probe on a speeding comet and have another spacecraft targeting giant space rocks in the asteroid belt at the time of writing.
The point that science writer and astronomer Dr Andrew May makes in The Space Business is that in just the last couple of decades, the private space industry has really taken off. It has required the ambition, resources and sheer graft of a select few talented individuals to really prove the concept that space isn’t just for the state, but now the door is open to further private space ventures. Businesses can count the financial risk in the millions of dollars even for a small project, but the universe is their oyster. May walks the reader through the science of a myriad of space industries, many of which are analogous to what we have on Earth.
From extraterrestrial tourism, to heavy industries like lunar mining for rare minerals and rocket fuel, or harnessing the power of the Sun in enormous solar space arrays to solve the environmental disaster that is fossil-fuel energy generation on Earth: everything is covered. And don’t forget the booming private industry surrounding those lucrative government space agency contacts.
As an established author with several non-fiction books to his name and a regular contributor to How It Works, this is May’s area of expertise. The Space Business is easy to read, detailed and extremely well-researched – and fascinating to boot. It’s a no-brainer for anyone who enjoys the odd Brian Cox documentary, and really for anyone who’s interested in space, technology or business.