With private space companies launching rockets, satellites, and people at a record pace, and with the U.S. and other governments committing to a future in space, Glenn Harlan Reynolds looks at how we got here, where we’re going, and why it matters for all of humanity.
With private space companies launching rockets, satellites, and people at a record pace, and with the U.S. and other governments committing to a future in space, Glenn Harlan Reynolds looks at how we got here, where we're going, and why it matters for all of humanity.
For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity focused on space as a location. Today, space is not just a destination-it is a domain, an ecosystem, an enabler of progress, and quite possibly the most valuable industry of the twenty-first century.Three things you need to know: Space as an industry is notoriously complex-which means it's misunderstood. Space influences and benefits nearly every other industry on the planet. Accessing space has never been easier.Space investor and entrepreneur Robert C. Jacobson provides a comprehensive overview of this spectacular industry, allowing everyone on Earth to understand the integral role space plays in our lives and how it will continue to transform the world. Over one hundred industry experts share exclusive insights, presenting a 360-degree view of the wide-ranging space industry, its emerging opportunities, investment potential, benefits on Earth, and more.Space Is Open for Business provides a framework for those outside of the industry to understand the critical context that led to the commercial movement known as NewSpace, illustrating how private sector trailblazers have evolved this $350 billion global industry and how NewSpace's exponential growth will lead our world into a new era of progress.Foreword by David S. Rose Founder, New York Angels | Associate Founder, Singularity University"A sweeping guide that will inspire you to think big about space, the space economy, and your role within it."Matthew C. Weinzierl, Ph.D., Harvard Business School
In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. In so doing, he traces the development of a seductive, and powerful, yet complex and unstable American geographical imagination: the ’transcendental state’. Historical and indeed contemporary space exploration is, despite some recent notable exceptions, worthy of more attention across the social sciences and humanities. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.
"Space, to use a worn metaphor, is in the mind of the beholder. When we contemplate the seemingly limitless universe, we tend to project onto space our own hopes and dreams (as well as our fears and anxieties). But like responses to Rorschach inkblots, there are many different hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties that one can project onto the night's sky. To those who approach it with a thirst for profits, space appears as a resource-rich goldmine, beckoning to anyone with enough wealth and privilege to take advantage of untapped markets. To those who approach it with a yearning for human expansion, space appears as a frontier that is humanity's birthright to conquer, its new manifest destiny. To those who approach it with a passion for knowledge and understanding, space appears as a tantalizing and pristine laboratory for scientific exploration. In these ways, our visions for humanity's future in space--what planets and moons we hope to visit, what we hope to accomplish when we get there--are more products of our perspectives about space (and our underlying worldviews and value systems) than anything else"--
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice
America's sense of space has always been tied to what Hayden White called the narrativization of real events. If the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature in America (Niagara Falls, Virginia's Natural Bridge, the Grand Canyon, etc.) were often used as a foil for projecting utopian visions and idealizations of the nation's exceptional place among the nations of the world, the rapid technological progress and its concomitant appropriation of natural spaces served equally well, as David Nye argues, to promote the dominant cultural idiom of exploration and conquest. From the beginning, American attitudes towards space were thus utterly contradictory if not paradoxical; a paradox that scholars tried to capture in such hybrid concepts as the middle landscape (Leo Marx), an engineered New Earth (Cecelia Tichi), or the technological sublime (David Nye). Not only was America's concept of space paradoxical, it has always also been a contested terrain, a site of continuous social and cultural conflict. Many foundational issues in American history (the dislocation of Native and African Americans, the geo-political implications of nation-building, immigration and transmigration, the increasing division and clustering of contemporary American society, etc.) involve differing ideals and notions of space. Quite literally, space and its various ideological appropriations formed the arena where America's search for identity (national, political, cultural) has been staged. If American democracy, as Frederick Jackson Turner claimed, is born of free land, then its history may well be defined as the history of the fierce struggles to gain and maintain power over both the geographical, social and political spaces of America and its concomitant narratives. The number and range of topics, interests, and critical approaches of the essays gathered here open up exciting new avenues of inquiry into the tangled, contentious relations of space in America. Topics include: Theories of Space - Landscape / Nature - Technoscape / Architecture / Urban Utopia - Literature - Performance / Film / Visual Arts.
Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment. The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit. The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997. Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of