Spacefaring

Today I finished Christopher Wanjek's Spacefarers. It was published 2020; it still holds up as we close 2022.

For travel to/from LEO, we're doing a bit better. The United States can once-more deliver astronauts to ISS, where at end of 2020 the Dragon capsule and competitors weren't yet rated to do that. Also the Chinese have started their station. Although, yes; Starship / SuperHeavy haven't flown, and the private-company stations aren't up there either.

As to accuracy the book is great, almost excellent. Although lunar helium-3 is stupid, and was stupid in 2020, after the stupid movie Moon got out to the Atomic Rockets side of the 'sphere.

I did wish an editor had flagged opportunities to introduce definitions earlier in the text. We get the definition of an "Astronomical Unit" somewhere around Saturn where I'd have liked it in the near-earth asteroid region. Also when the synodic period is noted (not by that name) it is in terms of opposition/conjunction (not by their names). The Hohmann, introduced later, does not work on those relative positions. The interorbital cycler trajectories aren't well handled, either; the orbits (where non-Hohmann) are adjusted not at the destination planet but at the start planet. And we're stuck with Earth/Mars. Although, yes, Aldrin's cycler isn't worth adjusting anywhere and "S1L1" is still where it's at.

Plenty of ideas floated here in this blog since 2019 were noted in that book already, which makes me wish I'd had it earlier. This does mean we get the Hall thruster although theory in the meantime has proposed alternatives; and the VASIMR which now has the Ebrahimi-Alfvén upgrade.

For politics the book is solidly Zubrinist: the government is a hindrance and private-enterprise has been doing better. Even in 2019 we could see the results.

Wanjek is no Zubrinist (or Muskist) on Mars. This book sides more with Hop David as to which world to colonise first - we need a stronger presence in orbit, and a Moon base, both for tourists, and also because supply is better from the Moon than from down this well. Mercury isn't taken seriously and Venus' cloudcities, neither. Nobody is considering Nyrath Chung's recommendation for moon Deimos.

The book is very good on the How To Live On Mars question, often glossed by Zubrin. Some might excuse that Zubrin wrote a decade earlier, at least for the perchlorate thing; but that doesn't excuse his ignorance of lavatube cities nor of growing plants for textiles.