Space Travel Guidebooks

Is anyone planning to write a travel guidebook for space?

There's many publishers (Let's Go, Rough Guides, Lonely Planet, Fodor's, Frommer's, etc.) and space travel guidebooks will sell just for their novelty value. Frommer's once published a fictional guidebook for the moon.

Lonely Planet may need to change its name...

The New York Times recently had an article on Earthbound travel guidebooks: A Guidebook for Every Taste (registration required).

And of course, there's the original space travel guidebook, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

Anyone with a descent notice of traveling and an understanding of space can write such a book. You will obviously need to cite lines from people who've really been there but anything else is just logic thought and some good (realistic) imagination.

Problem is, can you write +-100 pages about traveling in space? Without too much nonsense and side-talk off course

i don't see why nonsense and side-talk isn't perfectly fine. after all that's what virtually all of hitchiker's guide was/is/will be .....

Partly a Space Travel Guidebook may be written refering to this message board. Ideas what to do in space are posted here - and especially ideas how to make space travel as interesting as possible.

Just while I'm writing this I remember that astronomy could be made more interesting to the general public by showing the stars episodes of Star Trek taking place at. And really this can be done much better in space id est by space travels.

And really this could be a basis for Space Travel Guidebooks - possible title "A Journey in Captain Kirk's World"?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

howabout an "Illustrated Guide to Space Junk" companioned with "Salavaging and Appraising Orbital Debris: A Seller's Guide"

lots of cool old stuff up there. Apollo's "Snoopy", an LM or two, old spysats, Mars Observer, Vanguard, some OSCARS, and so on, not to mention the GEO graveyard.

Very good proposals - try to get priviliges like that in Germany called "Urheberrechte" (= author's property rights?) and work it out together with some engineers based on informations provided by NASA.

SpaceX is going to go to orbit till the end of 2004, Interorbital will do test launches for orbit next year and 2006 and so there will be a market for guidebooks like this.

Additionaly it can be used for touristic or busness-touristic space travels.

From my point of view you are very near to reality.

What about my recommendations?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Check out Planetes by Makoto Yukimura

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... itanime-20

Near-future SF about garbage retrieval in space