I'm looking at Scott Ott with envy at the (deserved) overnight success of his new book.

Does anyone think that if I stitched together a book out of the best of Transterrestrial Musings (focus on the satires and jabs at the press) with additional commentary, that it would sell?

Why not give it a try? Put together some samples of your best work, maybe tie them together with a little narrative, and then run it by some publishers. The advantage of a non-fiction book is that you can put together the proposal without having to produce the whole book up front. What could it hurt?

David A. Young
Titusville, FL

Definitely give it a go. You've got some fine satires IMO. Lots of information & reasonable speculation. Put me down for a couple of copies of the First Edition.

Go for it, Rand! The satires at least.

Changing of the Guard: From the Moon Race to the Race for the X-Prize, edited and with additional commentary by Rand Simberg ($39.95, Penguin Press).

It's a fact that the nature of American love affair with space adventure has changed drastically since the "space race" of the early 1960s.

Forty years ago the American endeavor in space was seen as a heroic national effort little different from the "Manhattan Project," involving Presidential bragging rights, ten-thousand-strong teams of engineers and yearly budgets in the billions, culminating in massive star-spangled hardware belching flame over Florida swamps while millions kibbitzed anxiously by TV.

But in 2004 the iconic American space endeavor became the shoestring effort by a mere dozen engineers to design and build a private spacecraft, culminating in SpaceShipOne -- a modest plastic-composite egg that would comfortably fit inside the nozzle of a 1960s era Moon-rocket booster -- and in SpaceShipOne's understated ascent from an ordinary airstrip to the edge of space and back.

The cutting edge in aerospace today seems not to belong at all to the "big boys" of Lockheed, Boeing, and NASA, but to a host of agile small players, of which Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the company that designed and launched SpaceShipOne, is but one example. The talk today is not of national prestige, flags on the Moon, 300-foot boosters, and recovery by aircraft carrier task force. Cost per pound to orbit, the business outlook for orbital tourism, and the legal aspects of regular passenger traffic are all more important.

What happened? How and why did America's space effort change from Moon shots that felt like national holidays to the businesslike and business-focussed flight of SpaceShipOne this summer? Does this change represent a retrenchment of the American spirit? Have we finally lost our taste for the frontier? Or is it simply that rocket science is no longer, well, rocket science? That the industry is finally maturing, settling down, and finding its niche in the private economy?

In a volume sure to fascinate anyone interested in this sea change to an activity still key to how America views itself, Mr. Simberg collects points of view from a wide variety of informed observers, ranging from retired NASA engineers looking back at Apollo to Young Turk entrepreneurs at XX and YY Corporations looking forward to orbital hotels and private industrial development on the Moon.

Each brief informal essay, addressed not to experts but to the informed citizen, bears on some aspect of this historic change or the changes we can expect to see in coming years. Some consist simply of personal reminiscence of an era now gone, while others read almost like closely-argued business cases for a new generation of space venture capitalists. Each essay is introduced by Mr. Simberg, who puts the writer's observations in perspective and links them to other, sometimes quite contrary viewpoints.

Mr. Simberg's thoughtful foreword appetizer combined with the spicy smorgasbord of expert observations and opinion he has assembled in this book will also give much food for thought to those interested in the direction America will take during the second half of its first century as a space-faring nation.

Actually, that's a different book, Carl (which I'm also thinking about). I'm talking about one that's not space related.

You could always close off your archive and print up your book through Cafe Press and sell it on your website. Test the waters that way. You get some money at little effort and can always sell out to the Publishers in time.

I know something of the Amazon ranking system, having had a book briefly in the top 100. It obeys a power law. Volume drops off rapidly once you are out of the top 10.

Scott seems to have peaked at around the 1,000 rank and has now dropped to 1,600. Based on this, I suspect he has sold around 100-150 books so far. Is that worth your effort? Remember Amazon takes 55% of the sale price and printing in low volume (i.e. under 10,000 copies) is not super cheap.

If you decide to go ahead with it, I recommend Instant Publisher. (www.instantpublisher.com). I've used them for multiple printings of two different books and have always been happy with their work.

. . .which I'm also thinking about

Okey doke. But don't think too long. Strike while the iron is hot, eh?

Oh, I've already thought too long. I started the book about fifteen years ago... ;-)

Sorry, I should have spoken more plainly: what I meant by "the iron being hot" is that you could hope to have this out by late 2005, perhaps, if you work fast, and next year I speculate. . .

(1) The public interest will be high, because SS1 is only recent memory, as are those amazing robots on Mars, plus there will be the return to flight of the SS and a restart of construction on ISS, JPL gearing up for the next Mars launch and returning something interesting (we hope) from Huygens, not to mention perhaps someone else will launch privately.

(2) The people you might recruit to write would be more interested in laying their opinions out in front of the public, since the NASA people want to keep their budget and the entrepreneurs may be interested in making their case to the public, not least of all because Congress will be addressing the regulatory climate. Heck, I just heard Richard Branson give an interview to Danny Bonaduce and Jamie White on KYSR. If he's willing to talk to those . . .um, personalities. . .then he well might be willing to write a few sober pages on his vision for Virgin Orbital.

(3) There won't be any important elections going on with 2004 over and 2006 a year away (whew!), and, God willing, Iraq will have become as boring as Afghanistan. Aside from the predictable crime and scandal stories, the public debate will probably be weakly focussed on arcane issues of Social Security semi-privatization or tax reform, both of which, let's face it, are brow-furrowing pour me a big cup of coffee booooring. Space! The Final Frontier! With pictures! Great stuff. Plus you can appeal to aging boomers' time's winged chariot nostalgia by the look back and Gen X's thanks we'll take the wheel now impatience with the look forward. Something for everybody!

(4) After plumbing to their depth all these scary Gotterdammerung geopolitical themes in the last year or so, I can imagine the public having a taste for something optimistic, non-political, New Frontierish, especially if the underlying theme is that new (and peaceful) glory can be had without lots of public money. Appeals to our purple nature, too, 'cause it includes red-statey private enterprise and blue-statey peaceful exploration of the cosmos.

Obviously this is a lot more work, but if you're lucky you could foist off most of the writing to other people, and, ah yes, if you did sell a few hundred thousand copies you could rake in a few hundred thousand bucks.

Of course, if you did, I think you'd be under the moral obligation to buy each and every one of us on TT a Guinness.

I started the book about fifteen years ago.

Well, you're halfway there, then! If you can work your grapevine, find somebody to call at a major publisher, maybe you can get a nibble? If they like the idea, they might well fund the annoying secretarial staffwork involved (they have lots of money for this), plus it will be a lot easier to recruit experts if a publisher is already on board.

You're bound to be hot, not only for the aerospace connection, but (somewhat irrelevantly, but that's human nature) because of the blog, 2004 being certainly The Year Of The Blog.

I'll shut up now. Just offering my 20 millibucks. . .

Although you have a keen wit and a great sense of humor, I'm not sure I'd spend my money on a book by you. Love TTM for the space news, but your political views rub me the wrong way.
Good luck.