Tom Hill

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“Tom is a visionary, and has a gift for turning his visions into engaging text while keeping the critical information intact.” – Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut and author of Men From Earth and The Return (from the foreword) “Applying historical lessons, Hill proposes an orbital infrastructure that could jump-start a sustained push into space.” – J. Paul Douglas, Editor, Space Operations Communicator “Tom Hill is working very hard to make humankind’s first landing on Mars happen...soon.” “The sweeping title promises a lot, but the book delivers, with style and a sense of humor.” – Robert Zubrin, President of The Mars Society, author of The Case for Mars and The Holy Land Not sold yet? Here's a little more enticement... Some sample text from each chapter Foreword - Buzz Aldrin Tom and I do not see eye to eye on everything. For example, he proposes putting propellant depots in low Earth orbit and using commercial launch services to supply them. I think that the infrastructure would be much more useful at the gravity-balance point between the Earth and the moon, but these are trivialities in the scope of human history. We both strongly agree that humankind must look outward to the planets and eventually the stars, moving beyond the cradle of Earth. Tom is a visionary, and has a gift for turning his visions into engaging text while keeping the critical information intact. Chapter One: Where We Are There are many within the space advocacy community that believe that larger space prizes, offered by groups such as the US Government, would open a new chapter in affordable space activity without repeating mistakes of the past. In recent space development projects, government agencies embark on grand projects, promising either to revolutionize space travel, or demonstrate that such a revolution is possible. As problems mount for the program or priorities shift within the government, those projects are cancelled, but the money ($5B according to a USA Today article) to develop the system has still been spent. The years 1986-2003 may hold those failures as America's space agency's primary legacy. Chapter Two: How We Got Here A second round of soul-searching took place in 1961, when the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin to complete one orbit of Earth on April 12th. US efforts were again called into question, since their first crewed flight wasn't scheduled until May, and it only involved launching a craft a few score miles away from the launch site. The newly inaugurated Kennedy Administration scrambled to find a way to turn this political tragedy into something positive. They fell upon an interesting idea, in that space spectaculars were a way to demonstrate superiority without direct warfare. Chapter Three: The Columbia Tragedy When interviewed, NASA managers said that the schedule pressure did not force unsafe or unsound decisions related to operations or processing. Workers on the floor said that schedule pressures did lead to unsafe or unsound decisions, but that they felt powerless to claim that as the case, because there was no failure to point to as a symptom. February 19, 2004, passed without the ISS achieving US Core Complete status.

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