This collection of historical documents provides insight into the history of the United States in its pursuit of the peaceful uses of outer space, with emphasis on the manned space program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as commercial American activities supporting human spaceflight in the early 21st century.
Rocketry and space technology have served varied goals throughout the Space Age: pure research, as well as research applied for national security, national prestige, and commercial profit. There have been varied actors as well, among them individuals supported by philanthropists as well as governments, intergovernmental organizations, international consortiums, and for-profit corporations.
This book focuses on space exploration, and in particular, human space exploration, leading to the questions, “Why have humans gone into outer space in the past?” and “Why will they do so in the future?” These documents help readers to examine the variety of fascinating answers to those questions.
In the United States, lobbies for the commercial development of space have become increasingly antagonistic toward the international legal regime of outer space, condemning the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the unratified 1979 Moon Agreement as anti-business. The Development of Outer Space: Sovereignty and Property Rights in International Space Law argues that the res communis principle enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty was misrepresented here, with essential help from corporate lobbyists whose real object was the defeat of the Law of the Sea Convention. Thomas Gangale builds the legal case for reviving the moribund Moon Agreement as a prelude to negotiating a second Moon treaty to establish a regulatory regime for the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources.
The author’s account of the inception and evolution of outer space law to date is deeply informed by his appreciation of such terrestrial considerations as the nation-state system, the contending economic theories of capitalism and communism, and the post-colonial struggle between the developed space-faring nations and the developing earthbound nations.
America’s presidential nominating process is inherently unfair and exclusive, yielding undue weight and privilege to the states that vote in the earliest rounds. More and more states are beating down the door to vote earlier, trying to redress the inequity on a state-by-state basis. In the ensuing free-for-all, the presidential primary schedule has become so front-loaded that the anointed front-runner with the biggest war chest in each of the major parties is the de facto nominee. The primaries are becoming mere noise and pageantry, as the national conventions have been for several decades.
From the Primaries to the Polls describes the problem and proposes the solution. The American Plan is designed to begin with contests in small-population states, where candidates do not need millions of dollars to compete and a wide field of presidential hopefuls can be competitive in the early going. A minor candidate’s surprise success in early rounds, based on merit rather than money, tends to attract money from larger numbers of small contributors for the campaign to spend in later rounds of primaries. Keeping more candidates in the race longer to challenge to the front-runners prevents a rush to judgment and permits more voters across the country to select from a diverse field. As the campaign proceeds over ten two-week intervals of primaries and caucuses on a semi-randomized schedule, the aggregate value of contested states becomes successively larger, requiring the expenditure of larger amounts of money in order to campaign effectively. A more gradual weeding-out process occurs, allowing a clear winner to emerge only after the full spectrum of candidates has been in play nationally.
In How High the Sky?, jurist Thomas Gangale explores the oldest and most important controversy in space law: how far up does national airspace go, and where does the international environment of outer space begin? Even though nations did not object to the first satellites flying over their sovereign territory, after more than six decades there is still no international agreement on how low the right of space object overflight extends, nor are there agreed legal definitions of “space object” and “space activity.” Dr. Gangale brings his background as an aerospace engineer to bear in exploding long-held beliefs of the legal community, and he offers a draft international convention to settle the oldest and most intractable problems in space law.
From the Primaries to the Polls describes the problem and proposes the solution. The American Plan is designed to begin with contests in small-population states, where candidates do not need millions of dollars to compete and a wide field of presidential hopefuls can be competitive in the early going. A minor candidate’s surprise success in early rounds, based on merit rather than money, tends to attract money from larger numbers of small contributors for the campaign to spend in later rounds of primaries. Keeping more candidates in the race longer to challenge to the front-runners prevents a rush to judgment and permits more voters across the country to select from a diverse field. As the campaign proceeds over ten two-week intervals of primaries and caucuses on a semi-randomized schedule, the aggregate value of contested states becomes successively larger, requiring the expenditure of larger amounts of money in order to campaign effectively. A more gradual weeding-out process occurs, allowing a clear winner to emerge only after the full spectrum of candidates has been in play nationally.
The Martian Almanac presents a 669-sol almanac of the coming Martian year, drawing from writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was widely believed that the planet Mars harbored an advanced civilization, and “first contact” was thought to be only a few years in the future. It features observations by Percival Lowell and other early observers of Mars as well as newspaper reportage, including accounts of Tesla’s and Marconi’s attempts to communicate with Martians by radio and spiritualists’ claims of astral travel to Mars. Serious reports and satirical editorials from this all but forgotten past will thrill and amuse the reader, and make plain that the vision of an optimistic and exciting future of humans engaging with sentient extraterrestrials preceded Star Trek by a century… a future that was imagined to be just around the corner!
The book also celebrates the birthdays of early astronomers, science fiction authors, artists, film contributors, and musical performers, the release dates of science fiction publications, films, and television programs, and describes sol by sol the events of past exploration flybys, orbiters, landers, and rovers.
The Martian Almanac is richly illustrated with the drawings by early astronomers documenting what they thought they saw on Mars… but what were that actually looking at? Computer-generated graphics are presented alongside these ancient depictions to show the Martian surface features that were turned toward Earth at the time astronomers drew them.
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