Top Picks Reading List
For those space aficionados looking for something really interesting to read, here are SpacePolicyOnline.com’s Top Picks. We started this as a summer reading list, but will continue it indefinitely, and will keep adding on new titles without removing the prior suggestions. We welcome other ideas. If you have a favorite book or paper to suggest, email us at info@spacepolicyonline.com. You can also check out our list of “Other Reports of Interest” on the left menu.
We have included links primarily to Amazon.com for convenience only, not because we favor it over other websites that sell books, and some of the links are, in fact, to other sales outlets. We are adding new listings at the top so they’ll be easy to find, but these are not listed in any priority order. They all are excellent reads.
- Joan Johnson-Freese, Space Warfare in the 21st Century, Routledge. 2016.
- Leonard David. Mars — Our Future on the Red Planet. National Geographic. 2016.
- John Logsdon. After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015.
- Jim Bell. The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission. Dutton. 2015.
- W. Henry Lambright. Why Mars: NASA and the Politics of Space Exploration. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014.
- James Clay Molz. Crowded Orbits: Conflict and Cooperation in Space. Columbia University Press. 2014
- Graham Gibbs. An Analysis of the Space Policies of the Major Space Faring Nations and Selected Emerging Space Faring Nations. Annals of Air and Space Law, vol. XXXVII, pp. 279-332.
- Matthew Kleiman. The Little Book of Space Law. American Bar Association, 2013.
- Buzz Aldrin (with Leonard David). Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration. National Geographic, 2013.
- Dominc Phelan, ed. Cold War Space Sleuths: The Untold Secrets of the Soviet Space Program. Springer Praxis, 2013.
- Roger Launius, ed. Exploring the Solar System: The History and Science of Planetary Exploration. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
- James Vedda. Becoming Spacefarers. June 2012.
- Boris Chertok and Asif Siddiqi, Rockets and People: Volume 4 — The Moon Race. NASA SP-2011-4110. Available from the NASA History Office. This is the fourth and final volume of memoirs of legendary Russian spacecraft designer Boris Chertok, published in February 2012.
- James Clay Moltz, Asia’s Space Race: National Motivations, Regional Rivalries and International Risks. Columbia University Press, 2011.
- Mark Albrecht. Falling Back to Earth: A First Hand Account of the Great Space Race and the End of the Cold War. New Media Books, 2011. Available from Amazon.com.
- Mark Uhran, NASA Assistant Associate Administrator for International Space Station (ISS) speech to the Space Transportation Association, June 15, 2011, on ISS as the backbone of a new space economy in low Earth orbit
- John Logsdon. John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 283 pp. Available from Amazon.com.
- Joan Johnson-Freese. An Allard Commission Postmortem and the Need for a National Space Council. Joint Forces Quarterly, issue 60, 1st quarter 2011 (January 2011), pp. 54-60.
- Economics and Security: Resourcing National Priorities. Naval War College monograph, September 2010. Publishes the papers from a May 2010 workshop at the Naval War College on the theme in the title.
- House Science and Technology Committee staff. Hearing Charter for May 26, 2010 hearing on “Review of the Proposed National Aeronautics and Space Administration Human Spaceflight Plan.” Available on the committee’s website. A really excellent encapsulation of the questions Congress is asking about the new plan for NASA, and committee staff analysis of its budgetary implications and therefore its executability.
- Eric Sterner. Beyond the Stalemate in the Space Commons. In: Contested Commons: The Future of American Power in a Multipolar World. Chapter IV. Center for a New American Security (Abraham M. Denmark and Dr. James Mulvenon, eds,) January 2010. pp. 107-133. http://www.cnas.org/node/4012
- James A. Vedda. Choice, Not Fate: Shaping a Sustainable Future in the Space Age. Xlibris, 2009. 201 pp. Available from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Choice-Not-Fate-Shaping-Sustainable/dp/1450013473/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275658618&sr=1-1
- Jay Gallentine. Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 500 pp. (Easy reading, though!) Available from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Ambassadors-Earth-Pioneering-Explorations-Spaceflight/dp/0803222203/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275659339&sr=1-1
- Paul Davies. The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. {Recommended by a SpacePolicyOnline.com reader) Available from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Eerie-Silence-Renewing-Search-Intelligence/dp/0547133243/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275688640&sr=1-1#noop