| ROCKETEERS How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space Michael Belfiore New York: HarperCollins, 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-061-14902-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-061-14902-0 | 305p. | HC/FCI | $26.95 | |
| Page 3: | "With our naked eyes we saw it as a single bright contrail scratching the pale blue sky over the Tahachapi Mountains to the east like a swiftly moving chalk line..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Tehachapi". (See p. 147, where it is spelled correctly.) |
| Page 13: | Halfway down the page, there's a hash mark (a pound sign) printed just at the right edge of the page. |
| Yes, I've been hard-pressed to come up with many errors in Belfiore's work. |
| Page 39: | "They launched these Super Height Interplanetary Travel spaceships, as they called them, from their schoolyard until one day the last and most powerful of the line exploded on launch into a towering mushroom cloud. Feeney and his friends jumped on their bicycles and tore out of there before they could be caught." |
| Similar experiences marked my own youth. But I never came up with names yielding such a colorful acronym for my creations. Pity, that. |
| Page 52: | "...meaning that air expelled from Feeney's lungs is allowed to leak out of the capsule at the rate of forty liters per minute—the same rate at which compressed air is drawn from the ship's carbon fiber air tanks." |
| I found this wording confusing. It seems to say that Feeney's lungs expelled air at this rate — which may be true (during exhalation) but seems excessive. |
| Page 69: | "At a restaurant with his fourth wife, Tonya, he'd doodle feather designs on napkins." |
| It's not germane, but I recall no mention of wife No. 3. |
| Page 71: | "up to Apollo's monumental Saturn V, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever assembled..." |
| I may be wrong, but I think the Soviet Energia was more powerful. (Of course, that was built long after the Saturn V rockets became lawn ornaments.) |
| Page 102: | "Over the course of a month, Binnie flew eight-four approaches and landings in the Long-EZ." |
| Typo: S/B "eighty-four". |
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