Category Archives: Space books

“The Pioneer Detectives” by Konstantin Kakaes

Konstantin Kakaes announces a new book about the Pioneer Anomaly and the investigation into its cause:

The Pioneer Detectives

I’ve just published a short book. I’m very excited about it, and wanted to share the news with you.

The Pioneer Detectives is on sale now on amazon.com for a mere $2.99, less than a cup of fancy coffee. It’s also out in Britain for just £2 (and a half-shilling).

The book is short and fun—the length of a novella—but also, in the words of Amazon’s reviewer, “powerful and sad”. If you’ve got any curiosity about how NASA works behind the scenes or why scientists believe what they do, I think you’ll enjoy the book. Many others already are—I’m happy to say it’s the #1 best-selling Kindle Single in “The Sciences” and the #2 best-selling astronomy book on Amazon.

The book tells the story of the “Pioneer Anomaly”—a force slowing down the spacecraft Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 while they left the solar system as humanity’s first emissaries into the galaxy. I hope you’ll forgive the mass e-mail, both if it’s been quite a while since we’ve talked, and if we’ve been in touch recently and you’re already aware of the book.

“The Expanse” – a solar sci-fi book series

Patrick Chiles, author of Perigee, recommends the series The Expanse as a good addition to the Solar Sci-Fi book list. He says it “is fantastic and well-grounded in familiar and believable technology”.

The books are written under the pen name  James S.A. Corey but actually come from a collaboration between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

The first book in the series is Leviathan Wakes:

Welcome to the future. Humanity has colonized the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for – and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer, Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

Two others in the series include:

LeviathanWakesCover_223x350

Spaceship book cover art for 1970s British paperbacks

Check out this great collection of spaceship cover art works for 1970s British sci-fi books: Mind-Blowing Spaceships from 1970s British Paperbacks – io9.com

Cover art by Tony Roberts for the book Beyond Apollo, by Barry Malzberg
Cover art by Tony Roberts for the book Beyond Apollo, by Barry Malzberg

Find links to more galleries of classic sci-fi cover art and illustrations in the HS Space Art section.

“SpaceX: Making Commercial Spaceflight a Reality” by Eric Seedhouse

Check out the new book SpaceX: Making Commercial Spaceflight a Reality by Eric Seedhouse of Astronauts4Hire. He tells the story of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, otherwise known as SpaceX. Here is the official book description:

This first account of commercial spaceflight’s most successful venture describes the extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement that have placed SpaceX at the forefront of the launch industry and made it the most likely candidate for transporting humans to Mars. Since its inception in 2002, SpaceX has sought to change the space launch paradigm by developing a family of launch vehicles that will ultimately reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access tenfold. Coupled with the newly emerging market for governmental, private, and commercial space transport, this new model will re-ignite humanity’s efforts to explore and develop space.

Formed in 2002 by Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal and the Zip2 Corporation, SpaceX has already developed two state-of-the-art new launch vehicles, established an impressive launch manifest, and been awarded COTS funding by NASA to demonstrate delivery and return of cargo to the ISS.

This book describes how simplicity, low-cost, and reliability can go hand in hand, as promoted in the philosophy of SpaceX. It explains how, by eliminating the traditional layers of internal management and external sub-contractors and keeping the vast majority of manufacturing in house, SpaceX reduces its costs while accelerating decision making and delivery, controls quality, and ensures constant liaison between the design and manufacturing teams.

The Rocket Company: Chapters 11-14

In the continuing serialization of the updated version of the book The Rocket Company by Patrick J. G. Stiennon and David M. Hoerr, with illustrations by Doug Birkholz.  This week you can obtain the following chapters of the book:

Download these within the next week. Only four chapters will be available at any one time.

See also the electronic version of the updated book is available at  The Rocket Company eBook by Patrick Stiennon, David Hoerr, Peter Diamandis, Doug Birkhol: Kindle Store/Amazon.com.