Come, sit by the fire...see the stars? the moon? See that V shaped light? Another airship is headed to earth orbit. Perhaps the passengers are going to Europe, or to Asia, or perhaps to the moon?

You are invited to travel to space with John Powell, an articulate and yet plain spoken inventor, visionary and President for 28 years at JPAerospace. Go ahead, sit in the armchair and read the book. Perhaps in 20 years
you, your children, or grandchildren, will be on one of his Airships, floating to the moon or Mars.

Along this reality journey you will find the risks and rewards of thinking - and delivering - outside the box in a place where innovation requires a Sherlock Holmes fascination, diagnosis and reasoning. Mr. Powell, an excellent story teller, puts the "AWE" back into space travel as he reveals just a few of the secrets in floating to space.

Setting aside the math, John Powell takes us on side journeys - using balloon technology - to the past, present and future of space travel . His passion knows no bounds as he presents the valuable lessons learned from failure and the result of persevering over each failure to find a nugget of technology.

You will see some of the limits of 20th century technologies that prevented fulfilling the vision, and how the 21st century is helping to deliver to your front row seat on the universe a grand vision on the future of space transportation by balloon no less.

This book is not comprehensive in either technology or ballooning. Instead, the focus is on applied ballooning to space. Yet, the campfire storytelling is first hand for here is the inventor and entreprenuer whose passion and perseverance reveal enough to tease the engineering student and tantilize even the experts. As the stories unfold, one can look at the camp fire slowly being stoked as stories emerging within stories, as mysteries are explained by fact...or one can simply stare at the stars and wonder how far can we go with a magic carpet ride by balloon.

The story is not fully written either. This book is only about the story so far. In a way, consider this book as your invitation to sit by the fire and listen to the stories as they unfold. After all, he has a blog. For those young at heart, consider this a written invitation to join the journey to float to the stars...

Good reading for ages 8 to 80.

If you want to really blow the doors off space development, read on. This might be it.
Transportation from Earth to orbit, space launch, is extremely expensive ($2K - 20K per kg) and dangerous (a few percent failure rate). This is what makes everything we do in space so ridiculously expensive. The fundamental reason for this difficulty is the extremely high temperatures, large forces, and fast decision making required to ride a tower of flame to orbital velocity (~28,000 km/hr).

Floating to Space by experimentalist John Powell lays out a solution that just might work; at a tiny fraction of the cost of alternatives. The basic idea is to use three types of lighter-than-air ships. The first travels from Earth to about 120,000 feet. Research balloons do this all the time, no problem. The second lives permanently at about 120,000 feet. Research balloons have stayed this high for long periods of time, but permanence requires on-site maintenance and Powell seems to understand more-or-less how to do this. More important, he has demonstrated some of the key capabilities in ground test. The last vehicle is a km-scale, inflatable, hypersonic flying wing that uses electric thrusters to achieve orbital velocity over a period of days. This is the hard part.

I don't know how to figure out if this works, but I intend to learn. It might be easier than many a launcher development we have already achieved. The key is that the atmosphere doesn't end at 100 km, it extends much further although it is very diffuse. The vehicle's enormous size allows aerodynamic forces generated by a diffuse atmosphere to provide lift. This lift allows very slow acceleration into orbit. Slow acceleration allows use of extremely efficient electric propulsion. Deorbit is relatively easy - pitch the vehicle up to expose its enormous cross section to atmospheric forces. This will decelerate the vehicle enough in a diffuse atmosphere that reentry heating is minor. The orbital vehicle then docks with the station at about 120,000 ft. Unlike today's rockets, there are no high temperatures, no enormous forces, and time is measured in hours not milliseconds. This just might be relatively easy to do. Maybe.

Powell's book is written for the lay public. Although he lays out the approach and the known problems, there is not enough detail to make a technical evaluation. The good news is that Powell is very open about his failures as well as his successes. He meticulously describes the dozens of balloon launches JP Aerospace, his company, has attempted with an entertaining description of the many accidents and problems. In addition, there is an entire section of the book devoted to the challenges that must be overcome. To my mind the most difficult and critical is reducing the orbital vehicle's drag -- or perhaps providing more thrust. Current materials, vehicle designs, and engines are insufficient.

America is spending nearly a billion dollars per shuttle flight. Flights after 2010, if funded, will cost two billion dollars apiece. For a fraction of one shuttle launch we could find out if Powell's vision will work. If it does, for far less than NASA's new launcher, we might well drop the cost of launch by a factor or 10 or more. Maybe much more. This would allow space solar power, lunar and martian bases, space settlement, asteroid mining and a thousand other applications to bloom. The wealth, power, and knowledge to be gained are immense.

If Powell is close to right, we need to do this. Now.

I loved reading this book.

John Powell shares his dream for safe low cost journeys to space, weaving fact with fiction (his Son grown up traveling to space via airships). This is no idle dream. As JP shows, he and his crew are slowly developing and testing progressively more capable high altitude airships and floating way stations.

Mr. Powell and associates are also very practical planners. They've arranged funding from small corporate adds at the 'edge of space' to huge experimental airships with military sponsorship. They even include free rides for student 'pongsats'...ping pong balls full of experiments from students around the world.

After accidentally seeing the "Space Balloons" documentary on Discovery a couple of months back (you can see it yourself, it's on Google Video) I said to myself, wow... I didn't know balloons could really do that heavy stuff, but there they are really doing it.

However, I stayed focused on Rockets and the Space Elevator as "real" options. I was continuing to happily ignore the ElephantS in the room... the Cost Of Payload Launch AND (what no one ever talks about) the cost of getting worthwhile amounts of cargo Back down here.

Then I saw this book in the store and figured it would kiill a few hours.

Can I make a suggestion? Buy this half priced from an Amazon Merchant or go sit in the bookstore and read the book. It is short and it is entertaining. Like the UniverseToday website review said, the first few chapters can either be loved or not, they read very well. And the really good stuff does all come in (Chapter 11 put me over the edge, he finally talked about micrometeors, and later makes points that even Branson should listen to about making money in Space Tourism - more like Disney and less like running a Concorde fleet.)

Then let it sit in your head for a day and come back here and post. I'd really like to get other people's opinions of The Book, because I could not (and can't) get the ideas out of my head. Not that this is the end-all but it raises points that Zubrins and O'Neills and Schmitts and so on seem to go out of the way to ignore.

Plus, it's not about far-someday-designs. The author's company actually uses the pieces of the whole and has a paying flight track record with military, scientific and purely commercial client needs being actually serviced. Already.

Aside from the recent sky-is-falling news that inexpensive Helium may fast be gone from the reserves (and Russia has the big 4He goods now), the book lays out a very interesting set of technical and business points that - when I stop the years of being told that only ICBMs can get to space - Powell appears to have thought out very well.

And unlike the Space Elevator (which IS a cool idea, even after reading the NASA papers that went into the real costs) Airships to Orbit don't appear to suffer that fatal requirement called "Requires An International Commitment" we all saw how well that requirement turned out with the ISS

You don't know me... but I do strongly recommend this book. And I'd love to hear what you thought of it After you've read it. (Jeff Bezos bots take note, I'm sending a copy to Blue Origin :))

Thanks. I'll be lookin' for updates.