How to Build Your Own Spaceship: The Science of Personal Space Travel Book

2009 was not that long ago, and yet this book, which came out in that year, feels incredibly dated. On the other hand, one of the few virtues of this book is that it is an illuminating time capsule, illustrating just how different the space industry was just a decade ago.

This book is essentially about the rise of "New Space" (although Bizony rarely uses the term). A mere decade ago it looked like the space industry was set to be completely overturned by the advent of a host of new firms offering space launch capacity at a mere fraction of the cost of traditional government and large aerospace launches. As of late 2017, there is basically only one player left standing, a relatively late entrant, and in many ways the most conservative of all "New Space" (but still radical compared to ESA, NASA, and the Russian space agency), and that is Elon Musk's SpaceX. Orbital Science Corporation's Antares is struggling, Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin is running a much more low key operation, and Virgin Galactic is as far as I can ascertain all but dead having suffered an engine explosion during testing (in 2007) and a fatal inflight breakup (in 2014). Most of the other players are likewise either keeping an extremely low profile or are effectively dead.

SpaceX oddly both affirms some and throws into doubt other heavily libertarian inflected premises of New Space. On the one hand, Musk and his company have not only produced a rocket booster that is every bit as reliable and capable as any of the legacy boosters (yes, SpaceX has had a few launch disasters, every booster yet made has had failures) but has far exceeded what NASA has ever been able to accomplish with the traditional rocket. Namely, SpaceX has succeeded not just in making a first stage return and land by itself but has done so several times and has reused these stages. NASA could have done this years ago, had they been so moved. So, perhaps there is something to the critique of the failings of certain heavily bureaucratic organizations. But on the other hand, New Space never succeeded in creating a market for private space travel. SpaceX, for all of its innovative ideas and technical achievements remains slotted into the existing system which is primarily dominated by the needs of the military, other government, or large corporations. In some ways, Musk has demonstrated how skilled a "government entrepreneur" he is (following from Stephen Adam's characterization of Henry J. Kaiser as a private businessman whose greatest customer was the federal government in his book "Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington".) Instead of a Smithian free market, we are perhaps seeing the rise of a new monopoly where a single corporation, SpaceX, will take an increasingly large share away from legacy rocket builders without creating an actual free market. This indicates the degree to which libertarians have deeply misunderstood what Adam Smith had to say about laissez-faire and the market. He didn't see *government* (per se) as the threat to free markets, he saw *corporations* as being the largest threat to such markets, aided and abetted by national governments (think East India Company). But this discussion is beyond the remit of this review.

The rise and fall of New Space (as an overall movement) is fascinating and if we are lucky might well be told someday. However, this book does a very poor job of even beginning to explain New Space. Six years ago I reviewed Bizony's THE MAN WHO RAN THE MOON which was likewise built around a great idea but poorly executed.

Although Bizony tries very hard to make this book an introduction to "rocket engineering" (I follow space historian Michael Neufeld [VON BRAUN, THE ROCKET AND THE REICH] in calling it "engineering", not "science"), the effort founders on a number of fronts. The most significant one at the top level is his presumption that space tourism was on the threshold (in 2009) of being a viable industry/market. Even though we live in very much a new "Gilded Age" of income disparity and great fortunes held by a few, these people are really not beating down the doors to take a 15 minute joyride into space. SpaceX was not quite alone in New Space in eschewing tourism but was certainly in the minority in doing so. Its reward for focusing on traditional markets has paid off handsomely. Bizony barely even addresses the advent of New Space in historical terms or even does any significant place setting (think of what the first page of any classic kids book manages to do). The book is effectively a catalog of now mostly defunct companies and ideas. As a historically minded sociologist, this lack of context is extremely irksome.

The overall tone of the work is also galling. It basically reads as nothing more than a 200+ page "puff piece" that you could encounter in a popular science and technology magazine, and might be too "boosterist" for even that venue. Bizony writes as if the new day of space tourism was just around the corner and not, as we have seen, dead on arrival even in an age of sufficient disposable income. By not focusing on the traditional space business, Bizony gravely weakens his analysis.

It doesn't help that the book is liberally *strewn* with technical and factual errors. I am not sure who did the fact checking, but they failed. Here are some of the more egregious errors.

-Orbital velocity IS NOT MACH 9! (see p. 12 and p. 54). Orbital velocity, ~17,500 mph or 7.8 kps, is actually MACH 25.4!

-The X-15 rocket plane WAS NOT MADE OF TITANIUM!(p. 58) The reason the X-15 was so heavy was that substantial parts of it were made of a nickel steel alloy called Inconel-X

These are clear errors, others are more obviously bad writing, such as:

-The Apollo 13 mission did not "blow up" (p.117), which leaves me with the impression of the *entire ship* blowing up and Lovell, Haise, and Swigert drifting in space. Rather *part* of the ship, namely the LOX tanks in the Service Module, are what blew up and crippled the ship. I don't think I am being pedantic here.

-While indeed all space debris is traveling at orbital velocity (7.8 kps or 17,500 mph), the actual closing speed between two orbiting objects is unlikely to be this high (p. 146). That's because most objects are orbiting west to east and within a fairly narrow inclination with the equator. These objects can still hit at hundreds of miles an hour though, but since both are by definition already in orbit, the discrepancy between these two is unlikely to be the full orbital velocity.

-The author is careless with his language in discussing low earth versus geosynchronous orbits on p. 31. He shows he understands the concept but omits key clarifying words.

(This is only a partial catalog, I do not possess the time or inclination to list all the errors.)

Finally, there is Bizony's execrable prose. While the absolute nadir of American popular non-fiction prose for me remains the work of Tom Friedman, Bizony is closer to that end of the spectrum than not. I loathed so many of his turns of phrase, in particular his efforts to be "relaxed" such as saying "zillions" or this phrase describing the onset of calcium loss in human bones in zero-G "In space, those 'ol bones shed calcium at an alarming rate..."(p. 149) Or a phrase like "...Europeans got the 'gunpowder bug' in the 1300's and have used it since for... well, guns basically. (p. 21)

And there is the following infelicity in language, describing how after the Soviets launched an unmanned "Zond" capsule on a free return trajectory to go around the moon: "...NASA sent its Apollo 8 crew capsule on a precisely similar trajectory in December 1968..." (p. 168). There is no such animal as "precisely similar". It is either *precisely* the same trajectory or it is *not*. NASA sent Apollo 8 on a *similar* trajectory - *end of story*!

As you may be able to tell, this book sapped my patience. The one saving grace was that I read it extremely quickly and being a space geek like Bizony himself apparently I did glean much of use from it, unfortunately much of it in terms of negative lessons from it, which is why this is a two star and not a one star review. All that said, however, I really cannot recommend this book. It is not a good introduction to space travel, it is not a good record of New Space or even the basics of the overall space launch industry in general. It is loaded with factual and analytical errors, and its prose is often dreadful. However, if you are a well informed and careful reader, like me you can probably get something from it.

Not generally recommended for most readers.