How to Make a Spaceship

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How to Make a Spaceship
How to Make a Spaceship book cover.jpg
AuthorJulian Guthrie
Audio read byRob Shapiro
Working titleBeyond
CountryUSA
LanguageEnglish
SubjectSpaceflight
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherPenguin Books, Random House
Publication date
September 2016
Media type
  • Hardcover
  • Softcover trade paperback
  • CD audiobook
  • Digital-file audiobook
  • Digital-file e-book
Pages448
ISBN 978-1101980491
OCLC 1011116852
Website How to Make a Spaceship

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, An Epic Race, And the Birth of Private Spaceflight is a bestselling award-winning 2016 non-fiction book by journalist Julian Guthrie about the origins of the X Prize Foundation and Peter Diamandis, the first X Prize, the Ansari X Prize and Anousheh Ansari, the entrants into that suborbital spaceflight competition, and the winning team, Mojave Aerospace Ventures of Vulcan Inc., Paul G. Allen, Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan, and their platform of Tier One of SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Synopsis

The book is an overview of what led to the creation of the X Prize, and the running of that first X Prize. Profiles of all the major players in the X Prize saga are included in the book. It chronologically starts with the influences that weighed upon Peter Diamandis, and his progression into the space industry. It also covers the process to get funding, rejections, and the arrival of the Ansaris, becoming title sponsors. The book surveys several of the teams that entered into the competition to win the Ansari X Prize. The team that is focused on most is that which won the X Prize in 2004, the one headed by Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, of SpaceShipOne. The book ends with an epilogue about Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic scooping up the SpaceShipOne technology, and the spaceplane itself ending up in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The book includes a preface by Richard Branson, and an afterword by Stephen Hawking. [5] [4] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Publication

The book was originally entitled Beyond: Peter Diamandis and the Adventure of Space, when it was sold preemptively to Penguin Books in 2014. [10] How to Make a Spaceship was released in September 2016, in trade paperback, hardcover, audio book and e-book formats. [1] The work was a finalist for a PEN Award, the 2017 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. [11] [12] [13] The publication won the 2016 Eugene E. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature in September 2017. [14] [15] It became a New York Times listed bestseller. [2] The book has appeared on several "Best Of" book lists. [11] Several parties have expressed interest in obtaining the filming rights to the book. [16]

Reception

Gregg Easterbrook's review in the Wall Street Journal said of the book that “How to Make a Spaceship offers a rousing anthem to the urge to explore." [17]

Bibliography

Awards and honors

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ansari X Prize</span> Award

The Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was modeled after early 20th-century aviation prizes, and aimed to spur development of low-cost spaceflight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Space Age</span> Historical period started in 1957

The Space Age is a period encompassing the activities related to the space race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events, beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, and continuing to the present.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Melvill</span> American test pilot and astronaut (born 1940)

Michael Winston Melvill is a world-record-breaking pilot and one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites. Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne on its first flight past the edge of space, flight 15P on June 21, 2004, thus becoming the first commercial astronaut, and the 435th person to go into space. He was also the pilot on SpaceShipOne's flight 16P, the first competitive flight in the Ansari X Prize competition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anousheh Ansari</span> Iranian engineer, space tourist and entrepreneur (born 1966)

Anousheh Ansari is an Iranian American engineer and co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI). The Ansari family is also the title sponsor of the Ansari X Prize. On September 18, 2006, a few days after her 40th birthday, she became the first Iranian in space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. Her memoir, My Dream of Stars, co-written with Homer Hickam, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SpaceShipOne flight 17P</span> Final spaceflight in the Tier One program

Flight 17P of SpaceShipOne was a spaceflight in the Tier One program that took place on October 4, 2004. It was the second competitive flight in the Ansari X Prize competition to demonstrate a non-governmental reusable crewed spacecraft, and is hence also referred to as the X2 flight. It was a successful flight, winning the X PRIZE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virgin Galactic</span> Space tourism company

Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. is a British-American spaceflight company founded by Richard Branson and the Virgin Group conglomerate which retains an 11.9% stake through Virgin Investments Limited. It is headquartered in California, and operates from New Mexico. The company is developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists. Virgin Galactic's suborbital spacecraft are air launched from beneath a carrier airplane known as White Knight Two. Virgin Galactic's maiden spaceflight occurred in 2018 with its VSS Unity spaceship. Branson had originally hoped to see a maiden spaceflight by 2010, but the date was delayed for several years, and then delayed again, primarily due to the October 2014 crash of VSS Enterprise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Diamandis</span> Greek-American engineer, physician and entrepreneur

Peter H. Diamandis is an American marketer, engineer, physician, and entrepreneur of Greek-American ethnicity. He is best known for being founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, cofounder and executive chairman of Singularity University and coauthor of The New York Times bestsellersAbundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, The Future is Faster than You Think, How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives and BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World. He is former CEO and cofounder of the Zero Gravity Corporation, cofounder and vice chairman of Space Adventures Ltd., founder and chairman of the Rocket Racing League, cofounder of the International Space University, cofounder of Planetary Resources, cofounder of Celularity, founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, vice chairman and cofounder of Human Longevity, Inc.

XPRIZE foundation is a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development. The XPRIZE mission is to bring about "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" through incentivized competition. It aims to motivate individuals, companies, and organizations to develop ideas and technologies.

The Heinlein Prize for Advances in Space Commercialization, generally known as the Heinlein Prize, was founded in 1988 to reward individuals who make practical contributions to the commercialization of space. The Heinlein Prize offers a cash award of $500,000 to one or more individuals for practical accomplishments in the field of commercial space activities awarded by the Heinlein Prize Trust.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">X Prize Cup</span>

The X Prize Cup is a two-day air and space exposition which was the result of a partnership between the X Prize Foundation and the State of New Mexico that began in 2004 when the Ansari X-Prize was held. This led to plans to build the world's first true rocket festival. Three X-Prize Cups have been held: in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Each X Prize Cup hosts different events and demonstrations, such as rocket-powered bicycles, rocket jet packs; but particularly notable are the Lunar Lander Challenge and the Space Elevator Games. 85,000 visitors attended the 2007 X Prize Cup. Although there was no X Prize Cup in 2009, there was a Lunar Lander Challenge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Lunar X Prize</span> Inducement prize space competition

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The Eugene M. Emme Award is an award given annually to a person or persons selected by a panel of reviewers from the American Astronautical Society History Committee to recognize "the truly outstanding book published each year serving public understanding about the positive impact of astronautics upon society." The award is in honor of Eugene M. Emme, NASA's first historian.

<i>Black Sky: The Race for Space</i> 2005 film

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric C. Anderson</span> American entrepreneur and aerospace engineer

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<i>Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future</i> 2015 book by Ashlee Vance

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">James R. Hansen</span>

James R. Hansen is Professor Emeritus of history at Auburn University in Alabama. His book From the Ground Up won the History Book Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1988. For his work, The Wind and Beyond (NASA) -, he was awarded the Eugene Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work by the Society for the History of Technology in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Billionaire space race</span> Billionaire space rivalry

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<i>The Billionaire and the Mechanic</i>

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References

  1. 1 2 "How to Make a Spaceship". Penguin Books Random House. 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 "Science - Best Sellers - November 2016". New York Times. 13 November 2016.
  3. ↑ Julian Guthrie (20 September 2016). "How Charles Lindbergh Inspired Private Spaceflight". Time Magazine.
  4. 1 2 Robert Schaefer. "How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight". New York Journal of Books.
  5. ↑ Foust, Jeff (3 October 2016). "Review: How to Make a Spaceship". The Space Review. Archived from the original on 9 March 2019.
  6. ↑ Ben Kieffer; Katherine Perkins (6 September 2017). "How to Make a Spaceship". IPR. Iowa Public Radio.
  7. ↑ Zulfikar Abbany (8 December 2016). "How to make a spaceship and get 'off planet' with renegades and college-dropouts". Deutsche Welle.
  8. ↑ Vivek Wadhwa (19 September 2016). "The renegade whose dream started the latest space race". Washington Post.
  9. ↑ Tom Zoellner (6 October 2016). "'How to Make a Spaceship,' by Julian Guthrie". SFGate.
  10. ↑ Andy Lewis (7 October 2014). "XPrize Space Race Story Gets Book Deal (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter.
  11. 1 2 Anita Busch (25 July 2017). "Julian Guthrie Book 'Alpha Girls' Gets Scooped Up By Welle Entertainment After Bidding War". Deadline.com.
  12. 1 2 "2017 PEN/E. O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD". PEN America. 2017.
  13. 1 2 "2017 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Finalists Announced". E.O. Wilson Foundation. 20 January 2017.
  14. 1 2 Diane L. Thompson (8 September 2017). "Julian Guthrie Announced as Recipient of American Astronautical Society Emme Award" (PDF). American Astronautical Society (AAS).
  15. 1 2 Jim Way (14 September 2017). "Emme and Ordway Award Winners Announced". American Astronautical Society (AAS).
  16. ↑ "Come on Hollywood, Give Us an X Prize Movie Already". Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Episode 221. Wired Magazine. 16 September 2016.
  17. ↑ Easterbrook, Gregg (16 September 2016). "'How to Make a Spaceship' Takes on the Birth of the Second Space Age". The Wall Street Journal.

Further reading

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