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The daring, revolutionary NASA that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon has lost its meteoric vision, says journalist and space enthusiast Greg Klerkx. NASA, he contends, has devolved from a pioneer of space exploration into a factionalized bureaucracy focused primarily on its own survival. And as a result, humans haven’t ventured beyond Earth orbit for three decades. Klerkx argues that after its wildly successful Apollo program, NASA clung fiercely to the spotlight by creating a government-sheltered monopoly with a few Big Aerospace companies. Although committed in theory to supporting commercial spaceflight, in practice it smothered vital private-sector innovation. In striking descriptions of space milestones spanning the golden 1960s Space Age and the 2003 Columbia tragedy, Klerkx exposes the “real” NASA and envisions exciting public-private cooperation that could send humans back to the moon and beyond.
- Sales Rank: #3860833 in Books
- Published on: 2005-01-11
- Released on: 2005-01-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.98" h x .85" w x 5.14" l, .86 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In this sprawling and sometimes polemical account, Klerkx, formerly associated with the SETI Institute, excoriates what he sees as NASA's present-day loss of vision. During the Apollo program, NASA's goal was manned space exploration. But over the last 29 years, the agency has scaled down its vision, content to send unmanned missions to the other planets and keep human beings in earth orbit with the short-lived Skylab, the troubled shuttle fleet and the "money-gobbling" International Space Station. Klerkx draws out some of the threads in the tangled web that connects the perpetually feuding NASA fiefdoms, NASA's major suppliers (and major congressional contributors), like Boeing, and the politicians who write the checks. He believes that private-sector entrepreneurs will wrest future space exploration away from the self-serving NASA bureaucracy, which too often views space in terms of military and strategic applications. Klerkx presents the nouveaux riches businessmen investing millions in space-related projects, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, as well as eccentric visionaries like Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society. The Columbia disaster hangs over Klerkx's tale like a dark shadow.. Some readers may think Klerkx is still under the spell of his boyhood dream of being an astronaut and giving short shrift to arguments against human space exploration. But readers who share Klerkx's dream will be captivated by his vision of what needs to be done to resume manned space flights and of what humankind is capable of achieving.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
What happened to the promising Space Age of 30 years ago? Klerkx offers a compelling if biased critique of NASA and its benefactors in Lost in Space. He delves into insider politics, showing how NASA bows to its major suppliers and congressional contributors. The result? Instead of Klerkx's claimed colonies on Mars, we have an unfinished, increasingly costly space station. The narrative generally flows well, even with some confusing acronyms, heavy financial issues, and erroneous history. The bigger issue is Klerkx's bias. Although he researched NASA's competitors and focused on two private endeavors, he did not interview NASA officials, weakening his indictment of the agency. Still, he's largely correct about the direction of our current Space Age efforts: spend your down payment on that Mars home elsewhere.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Wedded to the space shuttle and the International Space Station, NASA long ago lost its Apollo-era elan. Klerkx is familiar with the organization because of his work with the search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence program. Here he rambles through a variety of explanations for the dissipation of NASA's ability to excite public interest in its space programs. He interviews a number of dissatisfied employees, often ex-NASA engineers with entrepreneurial schemes. Inevitably, a tone of exasperation creeps into Klerkx's presentation, but more of lamentation than condemnation. Describing numerous examples of the conflict between private enterprise and NASA, Klerkx shows how NASA's institutional resistance to the commercialization of human space flight is a fundamental impediment to re-energizing the space program. NASA is, after all, a government bureaucracy beholden to congressional barons and its client contractors--a classic example of a Washington iron triangle that upholds the status quo rather than the public interest. Chock-full of interesting activity in the so-called alternative-space community, Klerkx's situation report, while critical, does possess enough optimism to encourage space enthusiasts. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Capitalizing on Columbia
By Eric B. Smith
When I purchased this book, I expected another viewpoint on the NASA culture that contributed to the Columbia accident. This is not that type of book. I suspect that this book was in the works well before 01 February 2003. The timing of the book's publication, however, was not an accident.
Mr. Klerkx has an ax to grind. In summary, the book is pro-private rocket launches, pro-space tourism, and pro-manned Mars mission. Which means the book uses 355 pages to show how NASA is not the proper government agency to sponsor and support such activities. Some very neat parallels are drawn between the early commercial aviation industry and the X Prize and SpaceShipOne. Unfortunately, the story always comes back around to bashing NASA, its current and recent leadership, and the current presidential administration.
Read this book only if you want to see some NASA bashing. If you want to learn about private efforts to reach space and the effort to prepare for manned travel to Mars, find a different book.
6 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Pointed Ax-Grinding
By Robert I. Hedges
When I purchased this book, I expected a thoughtful analysis of managerial and oversight failure. I am supremely disappointed to report that in this book NASA can do no right. I approached this book with my own opinions: NASA has lost focus, has lost funding, and has lost the technological edge. Much of this has been due to political hacks running their pet pork through NASA and ignoring NASA's real mission, all the while cutting funding for programs to levels where virtually nothing can be effectively accomplished. I wouldn't say that Klerkx disagrees with that point of view per se; he does appear, however, to have a major ax to grind with management.
In the view of Klerkx, it is time for NASA to let loose the reins of manned spaceflight, and allow private corporations go into space on their own. He presents his case that NASA stifles competition at every juncture while making his claims of incredible capitalistic prosperity in space. What he then goes on to claim, in an irresolvable paradox, is that NASA needs free market competition in manned spaceflight, but that because the required investment is so huge, no private company could afford it. His solution involves privatizing the shuttle and ISS. So let me see if I have this straight...he wants the US to foot the bill to develop manned spaceflight capabilities, but then just give it away? He doesn't say it quite that bluntly, but a large portion of the book details essentially that viewpoint.
He tends to vilify many NASA managers, some deservedly (like Dan Goldin), and some not. He also embraces some of the most arrogant and obnoxious of all the alternative space gurus, particularly the seemingly insufferable Robert Zubrin, although to his credit, he does adequately detail the personality conflicts that go everywhere Zubrin goes. He also adulates the Space Hab on Devon Island as doing extremely valuable research for Mars preparation. It may be fun to dress up in toy spacesuits and ride ATVs around in the arctic mud, but I hate to break it to you, Greg: Mars isn't like Devon Island, and this is basically Space Camp for ubernerds.
High on my list of issues with the book is the willingness to accept any data presented by the alternative space movement while simultaneously disregarding much of NASA's data. He repeats the mantra of low cost access to space endorsed by the alternative space movement that a truly low-cost, reusable vehicle is feasible, with claims of costs as low as $500-$1,000/lb for orbital insertion, versus $3,000/lb on a disposable launcher and $10,000/lb on the shuttle. I guess he wasn't paying attention in the early 1970s when the Nixon, Ford, and especially Carter administrations were preaching this exact same miracle of cost effectiveness for the shuttle.
Another theme permeating the book is that "normal" people should fly in space at a reasonable cost. Towards the end of the book, he even espouses the view that shuttle passengers don't really need training to go into orbit with the convoluted reasoning that 777 passengers don't need to know how to fly the plane in an emergency. That's true: of course neither do the shuttle payload specialists know how to fly the orbiter. At a half-billion dollars per launch, I think it is only responsible of NASA to expect that everyone onboard is put to some productive use. (This goes hand in glove with the adulation of Dennis Tito that runs throughout the book.)
The closing chapter is the weakest of the bunch, a trend which other reviewers have also noted. It essentially combines a lot of platitudes about the future with no concrete recommendations on how to help NASA (though there are a few pie in the sky theories aired.) There are lots of things I would like to take NASA to task for, notably the huge lack of focus in the shuttle and ISS, but at least I am willing to admit that NASA has strengths too, a virtually unimaginable concept to Klerkx. Only in the last pages of the book among much adulation for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute does the real motivation of Klerkx become evident. In a passage dealing with the cancellation of the DC-X (which actually was a shame) he laments that the Stockholm Institute claims that in 2001 the governments of the world spent $772 billion on defense (although many institutions not as politically far left estimate a much lower figure.) Klerkx is dismayed that US spending allegedly accounts for a third of that, and laments this waste (without mentioning, of course, that the US provides about three quarters of all the world's peacekeeping forces.) His true colors as an anti-government, anti-military leftist become apparent, and make his vehemently anti-NASA stance then appear for what it is. The best illustration is the following passage which speaks for itself: "It may well be that one of the best, and most optimistically subversive, uses of military spending is to pursue better, cheaper and more reliable spacecraft. After all, the $60 million the military spent on the DC-X...kept at least $60 million from being spent on bombs." It finally all makes sense: Klerkx spends the whole book railing on government based development programs, then complaining when they are cancelled; the truth is he wants the government to pay for the development and hardware, and then give it all away. I'm sorry Mr. Klerkx: the real world doesn't work that way. (Heaven forbid the military would have anything to do with it, after all they only sponsored most of the programs, including the shuttle in part.)
The book gets two stars for presenting some interesting information, but if I had to do it over again I would have never bought this book or wasted my time reading it. NASA has problems, but none are as big as the holes in this book.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Condemnation of NASA and a Celebration of Private Space Ventures
By Roger D. Launius
Greg Klerkx, a journalist who has covered NASA at times, offers in "Lost in Space" a quirky, idiosyncratic perspective on the U.S. space effort. It is one of several works that periodically appear taking NASA to the woodshed for failures, both real and perceived, that have prevented the accomplishment of a grand vision of space exploration. Of course, that "grand vision" is highly idiosyncratic and Klerkx's vision is certainly idiosyncratic as well. For Greg Klerkx, the grand vision of space exploration should lead to a renaissance for our species as we become a multiplanetary species, but it has been subverted by the military-industrial complex, government bureaucrats, and small minded politicians.
For Greg Klerkx, NASA is little more than a poorly-run government bureaucracy more concerned with self-preservation than in extending the space frontier. He invokes conspiracies too often to explain what has happened in spaceflight since the Apollo program, and condemns the relationship between NASA and its predominant contractors. Klerkx celebrates the private space entrepreneurs who have been pursuing the X-Prize, the Mars Society's analogue for Martian habitats at Devon Island, and MirCorps' efforts to privatize the Mir space station in the 2000 time frame. Through those efforts, Klerkx believes, NASA's monopoly on space activities may end. And it cannot come too soon for the author of "Lost in Space."
"Lost in Space" represents the view of a small but vocal group of space advocates who bemoan the current state of space activities in the United States. Brought up on the promises of Apollo in the 1960s, Moon habitats and space stations where tourists could travel, and possibilities for an endless frontier beyond Earth, these folks lament what might have been. Greg Klerkx offers a voice to their distemper.
Without question, "Lost in Space" is remarkably one-sided. NASA is neither so sinister nor as self-interested as the author believes. As presented here, NASA can do essentially nothing right but Klerkx's prowse seems to celebrate the alternative space community as incapable of doing no wrong.
"Lost in Space" presents a passionate discussion, sometimes fascinating and illuminating, but also carping and repetitive. It is certainly far from balanced. I recognize that balance was not necessarily Klerkx's objective and I agree with many of his criticisms of NASA, but sometimes his zeal to indict the space agency overreaches his evidence. As a challenge to the status quo this is an eloquent addition to the literature. Just don't take it as the final word on the subject.
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