Fly Me to the Moon: An Insiders Guide to the New Science

Product Review

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 planets' gravitational pulls. His idea was met with skepticism until 1991, when he used it to get a stray Japanese satellite back on course to the Moon. The successful rescue represented the first application of chaos to space travel and ushered in an emerging new field.

Part memoir, part scientific adventure story, Fly Me to the Moon gives a gripping insider's account of that mission and of Belbruno's personal struggles with the science establishment. Along the way, Belbruno introduces readers to recent breathtaking advances in American space exploration. He discusses ways to capture and redirect asteroids; presents new research on the origin of the Moon; weighs in on discoveries like 2003 UB313 (now named Eris), a dwarf planet detected in the far outer reaches of our solar system--and much more.

Grounded in Belbruno's own rigorous theoretical research but written for a general audience, Fly Me to the Moon is for anybody who has ever felt moved by the spirit of discovery.

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review

(2 customer reviews)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

opening the solar system to touring, March 15, 2010

Paul A. Martin (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider's Guide to the New Science of Space Travel (Hardcover)

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...

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

excellent title, excellent book, December 8, 2009

Gene Wagenbreth - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Fly Me to the Moon: An Insider's Guide to the New Science of Space Travel (Hardcover)

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.