THE LIBRARY
The latest book releases for curious minds
THE SPACE BUSINESS
FROM HOTELS IN ORBIT TO MINING THE MOON
AUTHOR ANDREW MAY
PUBLISHER ICON BOOKS
PRICE £8.99 / $16.95
RELEASE OUT NOW
Now that Bezos, Musk and Branson have each put billions into private space ventures, sending wealthy tourists to the Kármán line in bespoke space planes and supplying NASA with rockets, the future’s pretty clear to the rest of us Earth-bound mortals. We can all imagine a future where we, as a spacefaring species, will be able to jump on a sightseeing tour around Mars, or stay in a lunar resort with the family and don a spacesuit, exiting the dome habitat and visiting a UNESCO space heritage site like the 1969 Apollo 11 landing zone in the Sea of Tranquillity.
Or, if that’s still too science fiction for you to swallow, low-orbit trips around Earth that are actually affordable to the average earner. Maybe some remote asteroid mining – and before you roll your eyes, that prospect is far from science fiction: we’ve already landed a probe on a speeding comet and have another spacecraft targeting giant space rocks in the asteroid belt at the time of writing.