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Rocket science

From the right stuff to PayPal: Heroes, visionaries, pranksters and bureaucracies all play a part in the space race, two books show.

By Curtis Krueger, Times Staff Writer
Published October 28, 2007

Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots
Is Boldly Privatizing Space
By Michael Belfiore
Collins, 305 pages, $26.95

“Live from Cape Canaveral”: Covering the Space Race, from Sputnik to Today
By Jay Barbree
Collins, 336 pages, $26.95

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Jay Barbree, the dean of U.S. space reporters, came to Florida in the late 1950s to cover the dawn of the American space age. He broadcast the first U.S. launches of satellites and astronauts - and still reports for NBC News today.

Michael Belfiore, a freelancer for Popular Science and other publications, has become an eyewitness to another American space age. Belfiore writes about ambitious, sometimes zany space entrepreneurs. They include people spending millions to build rockets for tourists, rockets for competitive racing and an inflatable orbiting space hotel.

Two journalists, two very different eras. Now each has written a book to explain the side of space travel he knows best.

In "Live from Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, from Sputnik to Today, Barbree looks back at the NASA missions he has covered in a fast-paced, readable account that features many of the astronauts' terrifying but often forgotten mishaps.

In Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space, Belfiore looks to the future. And the future he sees is one in which private businesses, not NASA, take the lead in sending humans into space.

Barbree's NASA is peopled with brave, wisecracking, can-do men and women who make mistakes but prove time and again they know how to steer a complex bucket of bolts back to Earth. Belfiore paints the space agency as a sleepy, cranking bureaucracy.

Barbree began covering astronauts at Cape Canaveral before any of them had actually launched. In those days, it was possible for an enterprising newsman to know the "Mercury Seven" personally, sharing drinks or dinner with them at various watering holes in Cocoa.

In one case, he may have known them too well. Over some Jack Daniel's one night in 1961, Alan Shepard told Barbree he had been chosen to become the first American astronaut to launch. Barbree says he sat on this enormous scoop because he heard the information off the record.

Barbree, the only reporter to have covered all of NASA's manned space launches, tells his story unpretentiously.

He delights in telling two kinds of astronaut tales: pranks and heroics. Some of these have been told before, so it's not all that surprising to read about partying Mercury astronauts setting a boat in a Holiday Inn swimming pool. With no source notes, a few of these anecdotes read like unverifiable barroom stories.

But I liked Barbree's telling of some of the early space adventures that haven't been turned into movies starring Tom Hanks. One is the Gemini 8 mission, when the spacecraft manned by Neil Armstrong and David Scott began tumbling end over end so violently it threatened to knock out the astronauts. Armstrong risked everything by using his re-entry thrusters to counteract the spin, returning safely to Earth.

By the time NASA began flying space shuttles in the 1980s, the agency was filled with as many bureaucrats as barnstormers.

In Belfiore's book, a young astronaut hopeful named Peter Diamandis talks to a real shuttle astronaut and is told only about half of all NASA "astronauts" actually got to fly. "The rest flew desks in various administrative jobs, hoping against hope for the chance to rocket into space. And even those lucky one in two who got a flight went up, on average, only a couple times in a decade."

Diamandis decided against applying for NASA. Instead, he helped create what became the Ansari X-Prize, a $10-million contest to spur the invention of a privately financed, reusable rocket ship.

This is the best part of Belfiore's book: He shows us tinkerers and dreamers who are crazy enough to try building rocket engines at home, and maybe crazy enough to succeed.

One is a fellow named Tim Pickens, who builds a clever rocket engine that uses roofing tar as a fuel. He then mounts the rocket on his bicycle. What do you do with a character like this? If your name is Burt Rutan, you hire him to help develop SpaceShipOne, a real rocket that flew into space and won the Ansari X-Prize. Note to children: Always wear a helmet when riding your rocket-bike.

One innovator, Elon Musk, amassed a fortune by co-founding the PayPal Internet payment system and selling it. Now he's developing launch systems. Before starting, he commissioned a study by a well-known rocket guy named Michael Griffin. Now Griffin is NASA's administrator. And in a revolutionary move, Griffin decided last year to contract with private companies to send supplies to the International Space Station.

So now even NASA believes in spaceships built by someone other than NASA.

The future of space flight appears bright. But it may be brought to you by a company like PayPal.

Curtis Krueger covers space and other issues for the Times. He can be reached at (727) 893-8232 or ckrueger@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 26, 2007, 17:24:59]