Notebooks
Space Travel, Extraterrestrial Life, SETI
14 Aug 2011 17:13
Someday we'll walk on Venus
Someday we'll walk on Mars
Recommended (obviously, a tiny selection):
- Nick Abadzis, Laika [Historical
fiction, but well-researched. Micro-review.]
- Milan M. Cirkovic
- Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
- Leonard A. McGee and Stanley F. Schmidt, "Discovery of the Kalman
Filter as a Practical Tool for Aerospace and Industry", NASA Technical
Memorandum 86847 (1985)
[How we learned to aim for the stars and/or hit London. Free
PDF.]
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human
Future in Space [Micro-review]
To read:
- George Basalla, Mirror Worlds: Scientific Perceptions
of Extraterrestrial Civilizations
- Donald A. Beattie, Taking Science to the Moon:
Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program [Blurb]
- Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our
Vision of a World Beyond
- Joan Lisa Bromberg, NASA and the Space Industry [Blurb]
- Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the
Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age
- Serge Brunier, Space Odyssey: The First Forty Years of Space Exploration [blurb]
- Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space
Age
- Deborah Cadbury, Space Race: The Epic Battle Between
America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space
- Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, War in Heaven:
The Arms Race in Outer Space
- Milan M. Cirkovic
- "The Anthropic Principle and the Duration of the
Cosmological Past", astro-ph/0505005
- and Robert J. Bradbury, "Galactic Gradients, Postbiological
Evolution and the Apparent Failure of SETI", astro-ph/0506110
- Arthur Clarke, The Exploration of Space
- Steven J. Dick
- The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century
Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science [Blurb]
- Life on Other Worlds: The 20th Century
Extraterrestrial Life debate [Review by Danny
Yee]
- George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic
Spaceship [Or, "What did you do during the Cold War, Daddy?"]
- Giancarlo Genta and Michael J. Rycroft, Space, the Final
Frontier?
- David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of
Alien Life
- Karl S. Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds,
from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction
- James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the
Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon
- Ray Jayawardhana, Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life beyond Our Solar System [Blurb, ch. 1]
- Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management
in American and European Space Programs [Blurb]
- Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women
in Space [Blurb]
- David Lamb, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence:
A Philosophical Inquiry
- Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, Robots in Space:
Technology, Evolution, and Interplanetary Travel [Blurb]
- Lavey, Late for the Sky: Mentality of the Space Age
- Mario Livi et al. (eds.), Astrophysics of Life
- Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Lost Moon [Review at
Special Circumstances. "The story is not about heroism or miracles but rather
about training, design and expertise which surprisingly turns out to be much
more interesting."]
- Howard E. McCurdy
- Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the
U.S. Space Program [blurb]
- Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational
Change in the U.S. Space Program [blurb]
- Space and the American Imagination [blurb]
- McDougall, ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History
of the Space Age [blurb]
- Michael Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space,
Engineer of War
- Liam Sarsfield, The Cosmos on a Shoestring: Small Spacecraft
for Space and Earth Science
- Seth Shostak and Alexandra Barnett, Cosmic Company: The
Search for Life in the Universe
[blurb]
- Asif A Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge
- Glenn D. Starkman and Roberto Trotta, "Why Anthropic Reasoning
Cannot Predict \Lambda", Physical Review
Letters 97 (2006): 201301
= astro-ph/0607227
- Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring
Civilization
