The Logic of Microspace

Changing the focus of the multibillion-dollar global aerospace business toward smaller, lower-cost spacecraft is not happening solely due to technical, managerial, financial or market motivations. Rick Fleeter's second book on the small, low-cost space programmes which are the fastest-growing segment of aerospace activity, gives the reader a keen understanding of the full spectrum of factors driving this profound change. The text then goes beyond engineering technologies and management techniques to envision the tantalizing prospects microspace has in store for the industry, its present markets and those of the future. This title offers three books in one. The technologies underlying small space were the subject of Fleeter's first book, "Micro Space Craft", which sold out its first printing by word of mouth. This accessible book, cited as the only comedic page-turner ever written about aerospace engineering, has been thoroughly updated and is the first book within "The Logic of Microspace". But microspace is much more than a technical field. Management of the programme, the mission, the client, the team and even the press, all play a role in a successful mission. The second book within this trilogy-inside-one-cover brings the same understandable, humorous, fast-reading and informative style of the technical sections to a complementary book on minimum size and cost mission management and the philosophical and often surprising psychological underpinnings of minimum-cost space missions. All the technical and managerial tools to build minimum-cost spacecraft are useless without the human motivation to build low-cost missions. The third part is a dramatic novella, possibly the first in any aerospace text, describing several opportunities for benefiting humanity and the space industry via low-cost satellites and space missions. "The Logic of Microspace" provides the reader with the technical and managerial tools and perspectives to lead a microspace programme. But more importantly, the reader should gain the desire to use small, low-cost space missions to create a better programme, a better project, and even a better world. The author's humour and sincere enthusiasm, his deep, native understanding of the field are contagious, offering a route to an infusion of infectious new ideas readers won't want to resist.