Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider's Guide to the New Science of Space Travel

by Edward Belbruno, Neil deGrasse Tyson (Foreword)

When a leaf falls on a windy day, it drifts and tumbles, tossed every which way on the breeze. This is chaos in action. In Fly Me to the Moon , Edward Belbruno shows how to harness the same principle for low-fuel space travel--or, as he puts it, "surfing the gravitational field."


Belbruno devised one of the most exciting concepts now being used in space flight, that of swinging through the cosmos on the subtle fluctuations of the planets' gravitational pulls. His idea was met with skepticism until 1991, when he used it to get a stray Japanese satellite back on course to the Moon. The successful rescue represented the first application of chaos to space travel and ushered in an emerging new field.


Part memoir, part scientific adventure story, Fly Me to the Moon gives a gripping insider's account of that mission and of Belbruno's personal struggles with the science establishment. Along the way, Belbruno introduces readers to recent breathtaking advances in American space exploration. He discusses ways to capture and redirect asteroids; presents new research on the origin of the Moon; weighs in on discoveries like 2003 UB313 (now named Eris), a dwarf planet detected in the far outer reaches of our solar system--and much more.


Grounded in Belbruno's own rigorous theoretical research but written for a general audience, Fly Me to the Moon is for anybody who has ever felt moved by the spirit of discovery.

Genres: Science, Space, Astronomy, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 22, 2007

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Being a priest in the Church of Science can be such hard word. Sometimes the Church won't allocate funds to your theology research, other times God the Government will stop its grant blessings and turn his face away from his priests because of the wicked plans of the anti-science heretics. Foreword from a Cardinal in the Church of Science that makes daily penance at gala luncheons and TV shows on the taxpayer's expense. It might look like Stalin's Soviet Union, but those were another denomination.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edward Belbruno is a specialist in celestial mechanics. Usually, when a spacecraft is sent from the Earth to the Moon, it is first accelerated in a single impulse from a circular orbit around the Earth to a highly eccentric elliptical orbit, let coast, and then decelerated in a single impulse from this orbit to a circular orbit around the Moon. What Belbruno realized is that the surface between the Earth and the Moon that passes through the Lagrange points is special because orbital motion around it is chaotic, and so is that between the Earth and the Sun; you can navigate through these surfaces with very specific impulses, and let the spacecraft settle into the right orbit. The advantage is that you only need half the fuel for a given payload; the disadvantage is that the mission takes years instead of days. When a Japanese satellite heading for the Moon was lost, Belbruno working at JPL calculated the trajectory for another satellite to be used as a replacement. He later founded his own company to do such calculations.

[-ed- Erwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about low energy orbital mechanics, or, essentially, how to get a satelite or other such objects from one orbit to another using very little power. WTF!? It's actually a fascinating book, and I am not a physicist or the like. It is the story of an idea, a theory, and how it was developed, discredited, then ultimately proven. And it is written with such conviction and with an innate ability to communicate a highly technical concept, a theoretical concept, on a human, everyman level, that it is easily understood. A marvel.

[Jean-Luc · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to get from one planet to the other w/ very little fuel. It's an essay summarizing the author's research w/ a bit of biography thrown in. I think it's amazing his ideas, which we now take for granted, were so poorly received when he first proposed them. I was disappointed when he chose to patent his method (it's just math!) but if given JPL's response, I don't think he had any other choice.

Very easy to read. No math required. I love the hand-drawn diagrams.

[Ellen Druda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short explanation of space exploration using the gravitational fields between and around planets. It takes longer, but saves on fuel, basically. There are what look like hand-drawn diagrams that explain the ideas put forth, and that adds to the conversational tone. Despite the science, this was an easy read.

[Andrew McBurney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting and accessible book about an alternative route to the moon. Belbruno not only makes the physics of spaceflight easy to understand, but also leaves the reader with an appreciation of the beauty and balance of the Earth and Moon.

[Jef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belbrunno used to work for JPL and he developed an exciting low energy transfer with a ballistic capture orbit that utilizes chaos theory.

[Steve Gross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though it's a very short book, some chapters seem to be almost a repetition of others. However, the idea is new and fascinating.

[Jim Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author presents an interesting way to travel to the moon in an economical way, but taking a rather leisurely path and plenty of time to make the trip. It is unlikely that this method will be used for human travel, but could be used to send supplies of material to the moon in an inexpensive manner. The book is easy to read with no heavy math included.