Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider's Guide to the New Science of Space Travel

by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Edward Belbruno

Book Overview

When a leaf falls on a windy day, it drifts and tumbles, tossed every which way on the breeze. This is chaos in action. In Fly Me to the Moon, Edward Belbruno shows how to harness the same principle for low-fuel space travel--or, as he puts it, "surfing the gravitational field."

Belbruno devised one of the most exciting concepts now being used in space flight, that of swinging through the cosmos on the subtle fluctuations of the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691128227
• ISBN13: 9780691128221
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

opening the solar system to touring

Greatly enjoyed the factual data in this book, though the personal history components were not quite as compelling. The study and exploitation of the less stable portions of the orbital state-space opens up the solar system, allowing travel using a fraction of the energy expenditure needed for the more obvious routes, and Belbruno explains this without requiring immersion in the math. The later sections that apply these ideas to the natural events in the evolution of orbits were especially interesting; the interactions of comets with Jupiter were a fuller explanation of fairly widely known events, but the proposed explanation of where a planet came from to do the sideswipe of Earth that created our moon and tilted our axis was totally new to me. A fun fast read for any space junky...

excellent title, excellent book

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. How a weird off the wall idea turns into an accepted method to accomplish the "impossible" and save hundreds of millions of dollars.