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Open Space: From Earth to Eternity--the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos
- GenresScienceNonfiction
384 pages, Hardcover
Published March 24, 2026
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From Lunar Ice to Martian Dreams, “Open Space” Chronicles the Moment Humanity Turns Awe Into Infrastructure
David Ariosto traces the uneasy conversion of wonder into logistics, policy, industry and planetary ambition.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 15th, 2026
A solitary figure beneath a star-thick sky sets the tone for a book that begins in wonder before it turns to power, machinery and reach.
David Ariosto opens “Open Space” not with a theorem or a slogan but with a launch window. There is champagne. There is a countdown clock. There is a Falcon 9 waiting in the Florida dark. There is Kam Ghaffarian, billionaire co-founder of Intuitive Machines, looking toward the pad as if toward both a machine and an argument. It is an excellent opening because it tells you, at once, what sort of book this will be. Ariosto is not writing a technical manual, nor a hero’s march, nor a futurist fever dream. He is writing about the moment when wonder acquires procurement language – when the ancient habit of looking up becomes a matter of contracts, national strategy, methalox engines and who gets to arrive first with enough power to make their arrival stick.
In the dim light before liftoff, Ariosto finds the new space age exactly where awe meets procedure.
“Open Space: From Earth to Eternity – The Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos” argues that humanity has entered a second space age: broader than the Cold War contest, messier than the Apollo romance and far more revealing about how power works in the 21st century. Ariosto’s subject is not simply exploration. It is the conversion of space into infrastructure, theater, territory, market and mirror. His cast includes NASA officials, lunar startup founders, Chinese planners, orbital strategists, Mars advocates, antimatter physicists and the billionaire impresarios who now loom over launch cadence the way industrial titans once loomed over railroads. The question running beneath the whole enterprise is the right one: who sets the terms? Not who plants the flag, exactly, but who gets to define the rules, the routes, the acceptable risks and the economic grammar of the sky.
That ambition gives the book much of its electricity. It also gives it its strain. Ariosto wants to write several books at once – a reported account of the lunar return, a study of U.S.-China competition, a dispatch from the commercial launch boom, a meditation on Mars and planetary defense, a tour through deep-space aspiration and advanced physics, and finally a reflection on what kind of species humans become when they stop treating Earth as their only stage. Much of the time, impressively, he succeeds. When he is nearest to the present tense – nearest to launch pads, engine anomalies, geopolitical maneuver, or the hard practicalities of who will build what and where – “Open Space” is vivid, intelligent and deeply engrossing. When it lifts further into speculation, the grip loosens. The book remains interesting; it is simply less pressurized.
Long before rockets and contracts, the future began with a boy on a rooftop, looking up.
Its beating heart is Part I, “Return to the Moon,” where Ariosto is strongest as a reporter of systems under stress. He understands that the Moon has been reclassified. In the public imagination it still glows with Apollo afterlight, the old silver emblem of national prestige. In “Open Space,” though, the Moon is no longer chiefly symbolic. It is logistical. The south pole, with its permanently shadowed craters and the promise of trapped water ice, becomes the solar system’s most coveted cold-storage depot. Water means oxygen. Water means fuel. Water means permanence. Ariosto is excellent on this shift from romance to supply. He sees that the modern Moon race is not about reenacting Neil Armstrong but about building the first off-world node in a future transport and resource network. In his best pages, lunar exploration stops looking like a commemorative act and starts looking like the opening move in industrial geography.
At the test stand, “Open Space” is at its best: ambition under pressure, technology on the verge of failure or flight.
This is also where Ariosto’s reporting has the greatest bite. The Intuitive Machines material, especially the scenes around launch and the anxieties over propulsion, gives the book texture that many broad space surveys lack. Engineers look tired. Investors circulate. Families hover at the edge of national ambition. The details matter because Ariosto knows that modern exploration is built not only from grand speeches but from ragged teams living on bad food, sleeping badly and hoping the engine behaves in vacuum the way it behaved in tests. The prose can still swell toward the cosmic, but it is tethered to observed reality, which is where Ariosto is most persuasive. He has an instinct for the exact point at which a technical problem reveals a political one.
In the Patagonian dark, the book’s argument widens from rockets to routes, influence and the geopolitics of the sky.
His treatment of China is almost as strong. “Open Space” is particularly good at refusing the lazy habit of narrating the future of space as if it were still the private melodrama of American billionaires. Ariosto understands that no honest book about this century’s space order can leave Beijing at the margins. China here is not a foil but a parallel system: state-coordinated, patient, prestige-conscious, infrastructural and keenly aware that launch systems, lunar bases, relay satellites and tracking stations are never only scientific achievements. They are also announcements. Ariosto’s chapters on Chinese influence in Argentina and on the larger strategic logic of China’s ascent give the book some of its sharpest edges. Space, in his account, is not only a destination. It is a language through which states describe the futures they intend to dominate.
That is one reason the book feels so current without sounding opportunistic. Ariosto is writing in an era when the sky is already crowded with commercial ambition, when satellite constellations shape daily life on Earth, when reusable rockets have moved from stunt to operating principle and when the return to the Moon is no longer a museum idea but a live architectural and geopolitical project. He does not need to overstate relevance because relevance is built into the subject. The book understands that space is now tangled up with climate observation, communications infrastructure, cybervulnerability, military posture, industrial policy and energy demand. Its achievement is to make that tangle legible to a general reader without pretending it is neat.
Ariosto also has a feel for the properly absurd comedy of this age. “Open Space” is, among other things, a book about very serious people trying to prepare for futures that still sound faintly deranged when spoken aloud. How do you govern Mars before anyone lives there? How do you keep lunar commerce from becoming celestial enclosure? How do you build orbital systems at a scale large enough to matter without turning low-Earth orbit into a junkyard with a billing department? Ariosto does not flatten these questions into policy-white-paper prose. He lets some of their weirdness remain, which is wise. A great deal of modern space writing suffers from an adolescent inability to distinguish the visionary from the juvenile. Ariosto usually does better. He knows that ambition becomes more interesting, not less, when exposed to law, friction and institutional absurdity.
The prose has real force. Ariosto likes the sentence that begins in observed fact and ends in species-scale implication. Sometimes that method produces exactly the right note. The prologue’s insistence that this is a “course-setting moment” for humanity could have sounded inflated in a lesser book; here it lands because he quickly fills the claim with material evidence – launch systems, new forms of energy, rival state strategies, the practical pressures of living on orbit. He has a gift for moving from scene to system without making the seam obvious. That gift gives “Open Space” its lift.
But Ariosto’s weakness is closely related to his strength. He is drawn to amplitude. He likes the elevated phrase, the large horizon, the sentence that peers over the immediate problem toward destiny. At times, especially in the later sections, the prose runs a little hot. Not false, not empty, but overheated by its own appetite for scale. The book is at its most authoritative when Ariosto lets the reporting carry the grandeur. It is less convincing when every threshold must announce a civilizational transformation. The cosmos supplies enough sublimity on its own. The writer need not gild every star.
This becomes clearest as “Open Space” pushes beyond the Moon and Mars toward the more speculative stretches of Part II and especially Part III. The book remains lively here, and often genuinely exciting. Ariosto is good on the search for life, on ocean worlds, on planetary defense, on the way the James Webb era has sharpened the old question of whether Earth is exceptional or merely local. He has an eye for the strange dignity of science at the edge of knowledge. Yet the balance of the book changes. In the early chapters he is reporting what powerful institutions are building now. Later he is curating what physicists, futurists and long-range dreamers believe might one day be buildable. That shift matters. The chapters are not bad – some are elegant and some are moving – but they do not generate the same narrative voltage as the launch-centered sections or the China chapters. What had felt like a tense book about the present becomes, in part, a very intelligent catalogue of possible futures.
Still, even here Ariosto’s best instincts remain visible. He never fully surrenders to boosterism. He keeps asking what kind of order follows expansion. He worries, sensibly, about militarization, debris, strategic choke points, commercial concentration and the possibility that humanity may carry into orbit not only its ingenuity but its worst habits of extraction and hierarchy. Those worries give the book moral ballast. “Open Space” is not content to marvel at the new sky. It wants to know who will patrol it, price it, mine it, weaponize it, clutter it and narrate it. That makes it a more serious work than the usual future-of-space pageant.
It also places the book in interesting company. Readers who admired Christian Davenport’s “The Space Barons” will recognize the fascination with private launch culture, though Ariosto is less interested in founder mythology than in the statecraft those founders now disturb. Oliver Morton’s “The Moon: A History for the Future” is another useful point of comparison, especially in the treatment of the Moon as strategic terrain rather than nostalgic relic. And in its higher, more searching register, the book glances toward Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” – though Ariosto is more bruised by procurement, more suspicious of power and more alert to the way the sublime now arrives accompanied by launch manifests, security doctrine and competing sovereign appetites. He is, in other words, writing the cosmic book after infrastructure.
What finally keeps “Open Space” from the highest rank is not lack of intelligence or relevance but a certain overabundance. The book could have used more pruning. Some chapters feel like satellites that should have been deorbited to preserve the clarity of the main architecture. Ariosto has so much material and so much curiosity that he occasionally mistakes inclusion for pressure. The result is a work that is consistently stimulating but not always equally shaped. One closes it admiring not only what it sees but what it cannot quite stop seeing.
Yet overreach, here, is the overreach of a serious mind trying to take the full measure of a historical turn before that turn has settled into consensus. Ariosto is writing about a moment when the Moon has become infrastructure, Mars has become a planning problem, China has become a permanent gravitational force in the story of space and private industry has moved from colorful adjunct to structural power. He is writing about a period in which human beings have begun to talk about orbital industry, lunar fuel, planetary defense and interstellar aspiration in the same broad breath. It would almost be stranger if a book of this kind were perfectly modest.
By the end of “Open Space,” the horizon itself feels changed – less earthly, less certain and more open than before.
I would place “Open Space” at 84 out of 100: ambitious, stylish, sharply reported, occasionally over-written, somewhat overextended and often genuinely thrilling. It is not the final word on the new space age, but it is one of the more intelligent and wide-angled attempts to describe what this era feels like from inside – the exhilaration, the competition, the absurdity, the scale and the unnerving possibility that the species is beginning, at last, to build futures faster than it can govern them. Ariosto sees that clearly, and it is the clearest thing in the book.
All watercolor illustrations accompanying this review are by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
David Ariosto traces the uneasy conversion of wonder into logistics, policy, industry and planetary ambition.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 15th, 2026
A solitary figure beneath a star-thick sky sets the tone for a book that begins in wonder before it turns to power, machinery and reach.
David Ariosto opens “Open Space” not with a theorem or a slogan but with a launch window. There is champagne. There is a countdown clock. There is a Falcon 9 waiting in the Florida dark. There is Kam Ghaffarian, billionaire co-founder of Intuitive Machines, looking toward the pad as if toward both a machine and an argument. It is an excellent opening because it tells you, at once, what sort of book this will be. Ariosto is not writing a technical manual, nor a hero’s march, nor a futurist fever dream. He is writing about the moment when wonder acquires procurement language – when the ancient habit of looking up becomes a matter of contracts, national strategy, methalox engines and who gets to arrive first with enough power to make their arrival stick.
In the dim light before liftoff, Ariosto finds the new space age exactly where awe meets procedure.
“Open Space: From Earth to Eternity – The Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos” argues that humanity has entered a second space age: broader than the Cold War contest, messier than the Apollo romance and far more revealing about how power works in the 21st century. Ariosto’s subject is not simply exploration. It is the conversion of space into infrastructure, theater, territory, market and mirror. His cast includes NASA officials, lunar startup founders, Chinese planners, orbital strategists, Mars advocates, antimatter physicists and the billionaire impresarios who now loom over launch cadence the way industrial titans once loomed over railroads. The question running beneath the whole enterprise is the right one: who sets the terms? Not who plants the flag, exactly, but who gets to define the rules, the routes, the acceptable risks and the economic grammar of the sky.
That ambition gives the book much of its electricity. It also gives it its strain. Ariosto wants to write several books at once – a reported account of the lunar return, a study of U.S.-China competition, a dispatch from the commercial launch boom, a meditation on Mars and planetary defense, a tour through deep-space aspiration and advanced physics, and finally a reflection on what kind of species humans become when they stop treating Earth as their only stage. Much of the time, impressively, he succeeds. When he is nearest to the present tense – nearest to launch pads, engine anomalies, geopolitical maneuver, or the hard practicalities of who will build what and where – “Open Space” is vivid, intelligent and deeply engrossing. When it lifts further into speculation, the grip loosens. The book remains interesting; it is simply less pressurized.
Long before rockets and contracts, the future began with a boy on a rooftop, looking up.
Its beating heart is Part I, “Return to the Moon,” where Ariosto is strongest as a reporter of systems under stress. He understands that the Moon has been reclassified. In the public imagination it still glows with Apollo afterlight, the old silver emblem of national prestige. In “Open Space,” though, the Moon is no longer chiefly symbolic. It is logistical. The south pole, with its permanently shadowed craters and the promise of trapped water ice, becomes the solar system’s most coveted cold-storage depot. Water means oxygen. Water means fuel. Water means permanence. Ariosto is excellent on this shift from romance to supply. He sees that the modern Moon race is not about reenacting Neil Armstrong but about building the first off-world node in a future transport and resource network. In his best pages, lunar exploration stops looking like a commemorative act and starts looking like the opening move in industrial geography.
At the test stand, “Open Space” is at its best: ambition under pressure, technology on the verge of failure or flight.
This is also where Ariosto’s reporting has the greatest bite. The Intuitive Machines material, especially the scenes around launch and the anxieties over propulsion, gives the book texture that many broad space surveys lack. Engineers look tired. Investors circulate. Families hover at the edge of national ambition. The details matter because Ariosto knows that modern exploration is built not only from grand speeches but from ragged teams living on bad food, sleeping badly and hoping the engine behaves in vacuum the way it behaved in tests. The prose can still swell toward the cosmic, but it is tethered to observed reality, which is where Ariosto is most persuasive. He has an instinct for the exact point at which a technical problem reveals a political one.
In the Patagonian dark, the book’s argument widens from rockets to routes, influence and the geopolitics of the sky.
His treatment of China is almost as strong. “Open Space” is particularly good at refusing the lazy habit of narrating the future of space as if it were still the private melodrama of American billionaires. Ariosto understands that no honest book about this century’s space order can leave Beijing at the margins. China here is not a foil but a parallel system: state-coordinated, patient, prestige-conscious, infrastructural and keenly aware that launch systems, lunar bases, relay satellites and tracking stations are never only scientific achievements. They are also announcements. Ariosto’s chapters on Chinese influence in Argentina and on the larger strategic logic of China’s ascent give the book some of its sharpest edges. Space, in his account, is not only a destination. It is a language through which states describe the futures they intend to dominate.
That is one reason the book feels so current without sounding opportunistic. Ariosto is writing in an era when the sky is already crowded with commercial ambition, when satellite constellations shape daily life on Earth, when reusable rockets have moved from stunt to operating principle and when the return to the Moon is no longer a museum idea but a live architectural and geopolitical project. He does not need to overstate relevance because relevance is built into the subject. The book understands that space is now tangled up with climate observation, communications infrastructure, cybervulnerability, military posture, industrial policy and energy demand. Its achievement is to make that tangle legible to a general reader without pretending it is neat.
Ariosto also has a feel for the properly absurd comedy of this age. “Open Space” is, among other things, a book about very serious people trying to prepare for futures that still sound faintly deranged when spoken aloud. How do you govern Mars before anyone lives there? How do you keep lunar commerce from becoming celestial enclosure? How do you build orbital systems at a scale large enough to matter without turning low-Earth orbit into a junkyard with a billing department? Ariosto does not flatten these questions into policy-white-paper prose. He lets some of their weirdness remain, which is wise. A great deal of modern space writing suffers from an adolescent inability to distinguish the visionary from the juvenile. Ariosto usually does better. He knows that ambition becomes more interesting, not less, when exposed to law, friction and institutional absurdity.
The prose has real force. Ariosto likes the sentence that begins in observed fact and ends in species-scale implication. Sometimes that method produces exactly the right note. The prologue’s insistence that this is a “course-setting moment” for humanity could have sounded inflated in a lesser book; here it lands because he quickly fills the claim with material evidence – launch systems, new forms of energy, rival state strategies, the practical pressures of living on orbit. He has a gift for moving from scene to system without making the seam obvious. That gift gives “Open Space” its lift.
But Ariosto’s weakness is closely related to his strength. He is drawn to amplitude. He likes the elevated phrase, the large horizon, the sentence that peers over the immediate problem toward destiny. At times, especially in the later sections, the prose runs a little hot. Not false, not empty, but overheated by its own appetite for scale. The book is at its most authoritative when Ariosto lets the reporting carry the grandeur. It is less convincing when every threshold must announce a civilizational transformation. The cosmos supplies enough sublimity on its own. The writer need not gild every star.
This becomes clearest as “Open Space” pushes beyond the Moon and Mars toward the more speculative stretches of Part II and especially Part III. The book remains lively here, and often genuinely exciting. Ariosto is good on the search for life, on ocean worlds, on planetary defense, on the way the James Webb era has sharpened the old question of whether Earth is exceptional or merely local. He has an eye for the strange dignity of science at the edge of knowledge. Yet the balance of the book changes. In the early chapters he is reporting what powerful institutions are building now. Later he is curating what physicists, futurists and long-range dreamers believe might one day be buildable. That shift matters. The chapters are not bad – some are elegant and some are moving – but they do not generate the same narrative voltage as the launch-centered sections or the China chapters. What had felt like a tense book about the present becomes, in part, a very intelligent catalogue of possible futures.
Still, even here Ariosto’s best instincts remain visible. He never fully surrenders to boosterism. He keeps asking what kind of order follows expansion. He worries, sensibly, about militarization, debris, strategic choke points, commercial concentration and the possibility that humanity may carry into orbit not only its ingenuity but its worst habits of extraction and hierarchy. Those worries give the book moral ballast. “Open Space” is not content to marvel at the new sky. It wants to know who will patrol it, price it, mine it, weaponize it, clutter it and narrate it. That makes it a more serious work than the usual future-of-space pageant.
It also places the book in interesting company. Readers who admired Christian Davenport’s “The Space Barons” will recognize the fascination with private launch culture, though Ariosto is less interested in founder mythology than in the statecraft those founders now disturb. Oliver Morton’s “The Moon: A History for the Future” is another useful point of comparison, especially in the treatment of the Moon as strategic terrain rather than nostalgic relic. And in its higher, more searching register, the book glances toward Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” – though Ariosto is more bruised by procurement, more suspicious of power and more alert to the way the sublime now arrives accompanied by launch manifests, security doctrine and competing sovereign appetites. He is, in other words, writing the cosmic book after infrastructure.
What finally keeps “Open Space” from the highest rank is not lack of intelligence or relevance but a certain overabundance. The book could have used more pruning. Some chapters feel like satellites that should have been deorbited to preserve the clarity of the main architecture. Ariosto has so much material and so much curiosity that he occasionally mistakes inclusion for pressure. The result is a work that is consistently stimulating but not always equally shaped. One closes it admiring not only what it sees but what it cannot quite stop seeing.
Yet overreach, here, is the overreach of a serious mind trying to take the full measure of a historical turn before that turn has settled into consensus. Ariosto is writing about a moment when the Moon has become infrastructure, Mars has become a planning problem, China has become a permanent gravitational force in the story of space and private industry has moved from colorful adjunct to structural power. He is writing about a period in which human beings have begun to talk about orbital industry, lunar fuel, planetary defense and interstellar aspiration in the same broad breath. It would almost be stranger if a book of this kind were perfectly modest.
By the end of “Open Space,” the horizon itself feels changed – less earthly, less certain and more open than before.
I would place “Open Space” at 84 out of 100: ambitious, stylish, sharply reported, occasionally over-written, somewhat overextended and often genuinely thrilling. It is not the final word on the new space age, but it is one of the more intelligent and wide-angled attempts to describe what this era feels like from inside – the exhilaration, the competition, the absurdity, the scale and the unnerving possibility that the species is beginning, at last, to build futures faster than it can govern them. Ariosto sees that clearly, and it is the clearest thing in the book.
All watercolor illustrations accompanying this review are by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
March 24, 2026
On February 15, 2024, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center. On board was Odysseus, a moon lander built and operated by the American space exploration company Intuitive Machines (IM). When the lander successfully touched down near Malpert-A crater, 190 miles from the moon’s south pole, it became the first craft to soft land on the moon by a private company. It was also the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Though it landed on an angled surface causing a 30-degree tilt of the lander, it remained functional and the mission was deemed a success.
Much of Open Space covers the current focus of space agencies around the world, and of the private space industry, on the importance of the moon. It is, once again, seen as a steppingstone to exploration of the rest of the solar system. The landing of Odysseus on the moon is the capstone of that portion of the book. It is, author David Ariosto says, a key part of an ongoing race to the moon between the US and China. He explores the current capabilities of the Chinese state run space program, and its main competitors. Those include NASA, of course, but his focus is on the host of private companies who today form the space exploration industry mostly based in the US.
Ariosto then looks at what might be next after conquering the moon. He explores current thinking (and capabilities) for journeying to Mars, and then potentially on into interstellar space. Most of what he reviews is hard science and technology and makes for interesting reading. The most “out there” is his coverage of the potential (and its currently ALL potential) for a Star Trek inspired “warp drive”.
The book is well researched and well laid out. For a science geek it’s a fascinating read. For anyone interested in the space industry it’s a worthwhile read, with the caveat that Ariosto’s deep dives may be a little too deep for casual readers. I was surprised, given the timing of its arrival, that there is comparatively little here about the Artemis program.
Read it for the deep dive into the current state of the space race, and the ongoing achievements that don’t get the headlines they deserve.
Much of Open Space covers the current focus of space agencies around the world, and of the private space industry, on the importance of the moon. It is, once again, seen as a steppingstone to exploration of the rest of the solar system. The landing of Odysseus on the moon is the capstone of that portion of the book. It is, author David Ariosto says, a key part of an ongoing race to the moon between the US and China. He explores the current capabilities of the Chinese state run space program, and its main competitors. Those include NASA, of course, but his focus is on the host of private companies who today form the space exploration industry mostly based in the US.
Ariosto then looks at what might be next after conquering the moon. He explores current thinking (and capabilities) for journeying to Mars, and then potentially on into interstellar space. Most of what he reviews is hard science and technology and makes for interesting reading. The most “out there” is his coverage of the potential (and its currently ALL potential) for a Star Trek inspired “warp drive”.
The book is well researched and well laid out. For a science geek it’s a fascinating read. For anyone interested in the space industry it’s a worthwhile read, with the caveat that Ariosto’s deep dives may be a little too deep for casual readers. I was surprised, given the timing of its arrival, that there is comparatively little here about the Artemis program.
Read it for the deep dive into the current state of the space race, and the ongoing achievements that don’t get the headlines they deserve.
March 24, 2026
Well Documented Examination Of Space Tech Beyond Musk and Bezos. At least in the US (where both Ariosto and I are based), if you're talking space these days you're generally talking NASA, Elon Musk (SpaceX), or Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin). This book goes into the details of where space science and tech are *beyond* just those three entities, traveling all over the world showing how different people in different areas are contributing to pushing humanity beyond our home world - and why. While there are a lot of details here, including how nativist US policies ultimately both created China's space program decades ago and pushed it to new heights (both literally and figuratively) more recently, this is also more of a complete overview of the entire field than a deep dive on any particular tech or event. Even as some significant ones - including the race to have the first commercial lunar lander - are more heavily detailed than other aspects. (For example, while space craft of various forms are discussed heavily, I don't remember any mention whatsoever of space suit tech and only the barest mention of space food tech.)
Still, for all that it *does* cover, this book will actually better inform you of a lot of things that perhaps even some within the space exploration field may not be fully aware of (as I'm all too familiar with the idea even in my own field that a practitioner isn't always fully aware of newer developments even in their own field). At 22% documentation, it is also fairly well sourced and because it is primarily reporting on current and near future tech and the histories thereof, Sagan doesn't really apply here - making the 22% more than sufficient for this particular narrative.
Overall, this is an exploration of space exploration in its current forms that is clearly designed for mass appeal, and I do think this is one that most anyone even remotely interested in space tech and how we got where we currently are (beyond NASA, Musk, and Bezos) will find quite informative indeed.
Very much recommended.
Still, for all that it *does* cover, this book will actually better inform you of a lot of things that perhaps even some within the space exploration field may not be fully aware of (as I'm all too familiar with the idea even in my own field that a practitioner isn't always fully aware of newer developments even in their own field). At 22% documentation, it is also fairly well sourced and because it is primarily reporting on current and near future tech and the histories thereof, Sagan doesn't really apply here - making the 22% more than sufficient for this particular narrative.
Overall, this is an exploration of space exploration in its current forms that is clearly designed for mass appeal, and I do think this is one that most anyone even remotely interested in space tech and how we got where we currently are (beyond NASA, Musk, and Bezos) will find quite informative indeed.
Very much recommended.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book was a dense, fascinating exploration (pun intended) of all things space. It was written very clearly and logically while being thoroughly researched and detailed. The organization was a bit hard to follow at first because it's not chronological, but rather it moves between technology, geopolitics, economics, and human exploration (thematic structure, rather than temporal). Once I got used to that, and it felt like the inertia started to kick in, then it was exciting to see what each chapter would hold and what kind of rabbit hole of things I didn't know I didn't know there would be. It did take a bit to get into it. This is not a short little what-is-space-x-and-who-is-elon, this book encompasses everything from what industries could make money in space to militarization of orbit to analog Mars research stations to the role of billionaires and startups. If you want a deep dive that is easy to follow, I would recommend this book. If you want something light and fast, this may not be your style.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for this free advanced reader's copy; these opinions are purely my own.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for this free advanced reader's copy; these opinions are purely my own.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you Netgalley for an advanced copy!
David Ariosto lays out the state of the space industry and makes it clear it is very much an industry, still political as ever, but much more about corporations than nations (even though nations are still a huge factor). It is also a deep dive into what the space industry could become as Ariosto explores the many, many opportunities for the rich to get richer off of exploring the resources of the solar systems. The book is exploration of how the fantastic, the fictional, and the extraordinary become mundane and ordinary as rules and regulations as well as shareholder reports and internal memos become a part of the realm of space exploration. Very thick and hard to wade into, but a good look at what is happening now to our approach to space and what might happen.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews