Space Travel, Extraterrestrial Life, SETI

10 Oct 2009 12:40

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Someday we'll walk on Venus
Someday we'll walk on Mars

Recommended (obviously, a tiny selection):
• Milan M. Cirkovic
  • "Too Early? On the Apparent Conflict of Astrobiology and Cosmology", astro-ph/0505006 = Biology and Philosohpy 21 (2006): 369--379
• Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
• Leonard A. McGee and Stanley F. Schmidt, "Discovery of the Kalman Filter as a Practical Tool for Aerospace and Industry", NASA Technical Memorandum 86847 (1985) [How we learned to aim for the stars and/or hit London. Free PDF.]
• Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

To read:
• George Basalla, Mirror Worlds: Scientific Perceptions of Extraterrestrial Civilizations
• Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond
• Bromberg, NASA and the Space Industry
• Matthew Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age
• Serge Brunier, Space Odyssey: The First Forty Years of Space Exploration [blurb]
• Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age
• Deborah Cadbury, Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space
• Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space
• Milan M. Cirkovic
  • "The Anthropic Principle and the Duration of the Cosmological Past", astro-ph/0505005
  • and Robert J. Bradbury, "Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution and the Apparent Failure of SETI", astro-ph/0506110
• Arthur Clarke, The Exploration of Space
• Steven J. Dick
  • The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science [Blurb]
  • Life on Other Worlds: The 20th Century Extraterrestrial Life debate [Review by Danny Yee]
• George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship [Or, "What did you do during the Cold War, Daddy?"]
• Giancarlo Genta and Michael J. Rycroft, Space, the Final Frontier?
• David Grinspoon, Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life
• Karl S. Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds, from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction
• James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon
• Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs
• Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space [Blurb]
• David Lamb, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: A Philosophical Inquiry
• Lavey, Late for the Sky: Mentality of the Space Age
• Mario Livi et al. (eds.), Astrophysics of Life
• Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Lost Moon [Review at Special Circumstances. "The story is not about heroism or miracles but rather about training, design and expertise which surprisingly turns out to be much more interesting."]
• McCurdy
  • Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program
  • Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program
• McDougall, ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
• Michael Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
• Liam Sarsfield, The Cosmos on a Shoestring: Small Spacecraft for Space and Earth Science
• Seth Shostak and Alexandra Barnett, Cosmic Company: The Search for Life in the Universe [blurb]
• Asif A Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge
• Glenn D. Starkman and Roberto Trotta, "Why Anthropic Reasoning Cannot Predict \Lambda", Physical Review Letters 97 (2006): 201301 = astro-ph/0607227
• Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization