Book Update: Chapters

As promised I'm posting some updates about my forthcoming book. Here I am going to share the basic outline.

After laying out an initial argument for why we should even bother settling space, I take a chronological view of space exploration beginning with Sputnik, moving through the present day and then on to the near and far future - in all cases using mass value as a guiding metric. The history I present is fairly conventional and won't contain any surprises for people already familiar with the subject - but being able to apply my own metric to it I think helps put it into a new context. Likewise many of the speculative concepts I discuss - Mars missions, rotating space habitats - have been well covered elsewhere, but where I add value is linking them together through a single metric. At present, the following chapters are written:

Why Go?

I argue why it is necessary to settle space and refute some of the common counter arguments.

Understanding Space

This chapter deals with technical matt…