A Vision of Future Space Transportation - Tim McElyea

The glorious space age has come and gone. So what now? What's next? To go further, to go faster, we must take the next step. Space is still full of mystery and challenges humankind as much as ever. Ideas on what the next step is, or steps are, vary greatly and there is no shortage of concepts for the future of space transportation. Concepts include new engines, new strategies, harnessing gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear energy and more. This book will take you on a guided visual tour of the future of space transportation. From Earth to Orbit to In-Space transportation, you will sample what is being considered and get an easy-to-understand explanation of what the spacecraft will do and how it will work. Decades ago Dr. Wernher von Braun teamed with Walt Disney to animate a mission to Mars and inspired a generation. Today multimedia, animation and video serve a similar communications need. The CD-ROM included contains official NASA videos, vehicle concept animation, and dynamic multimedia. View spacecraft concepts in 3D, see mission animation and hear first hand what the visionaries of the aerospace industry hope to accomplish.

"[The images] are in full colour and detailed, and anyone who has an interest in space transportation will find them worthwhile. I can see future space historians looking to these images to indicate how ideas developed, just as today we look at illustrations of von Braun's early work to see how the concept of the Saturn V and Apollo developed." -- Martin Turner, The Observatory, April 2004.
"[The images] are in full colour and detailed, and anyone who has an interest in space transportation will find them worthwhile. I can see future space historians looking to these images to indicate how ideas developed, just as today we look at illustrations of von Braun's early work to see how the concept of the Saturn V and Apollo developed." -- Martin Turner, The Observatory, April 2004.

"If the reader is looking for great illustrations this is a dream and let us hope it will stimulate a debate on how we can turn some of the concepts into reality" -- Spaceflight, December 2004.