A revolution in spaceflight is likely soon with the prospect of everyday access to orbit within fifteen years. Costly launch vehicles based on ballistic missiles will be replaced by ‘spaceplanes’, using technology that exists today. In five years' time, a prototype could be built, and with a further ten years of detailed development, the design could approach airliner maturity, reducing the cost of sending people into space some one thousand times to around US$20,000.Spaceplane development has, in effect, been suppressed by entrenched thinking and short-term vested...
A revolution in spaceflight is likely soon with the prospect of everyday access to orbit within fifteen years. Costly launch vehicles based on ballist...
Amid a century devastated by war, space exploration was perhaps mankind's greatest achievement of the twentieth century. Yet remarkably, in a world where most technology progresses constantly, space exploration appears to have gone backwards. Man has not returned to the moon since 1972; the space shuttle programme has finished and not been replaced; much-vaunted promises of space tourism have not become realistic.In this remarkable book, David Ashford looks back at the story of space exploration, identifying the factors that were a driving force behind the eye-catching programmes of the cold...
Amid a century devastated by war, space exploration was perhaps mankind's greatest achievement of the twentieth century. Yet remarkably, in a world wh...