I'll be out of the office for the next couple of weeks - first for a visit to the Midwest, including a tête-à-tête with King Tut, then for the X Prize Cup festivities in New Mexico. As always, postings to the log during the trip will be dependent on time, bandwidth and news developments - but in any case, I'll try to send some virtual postcards from the trip. In the meantime, here's the Cosmic Log Used Book Club selection for October:
This month, the CLUB Club selection is "Orbit," a novel by aviation expert John J. Nance. This is a private-enterprise space thriller, which follows a regular guy who wins a contest, takes an orbital trip and turns into a worldwide celebrity when he has to deal with a deadly crisis (and basically blog about it from space).
The book has a couple of timely twists: First, it's an extrapolation of what's going on in the commercial space race, with references to the X Prize and Bigelow Aerospace. Second, the novel's crisis arises when a piece of space debris slams through the ship - which echoes the real-life concern over damage done to the shuttle Atlantis during last month's flight.
Here's hoping my mummies-to-missiles tour is a bit less eventful.
