On The Shoulders of Stars: A Space Anthology: Historical Minds for the Contemporary Astronautical Age - Paperback

by Alistair Wainwright (Author)

Space is not a new subject. It is an old examination.

On the Shoulders of Stars convenes one hundred and ninety-three of history's most rigorous minds as a standing examination board for the contemporary space domain. Strategists and economists, systems theorists and methodologists, historians, philosophers, the pioneers of machine intelligence and the founders of astronautics itself. Each is asked the same question. What does your instrument do to orbit?

The answers arrive at the point of hardest contact. Sun Tzu on deception among rivals who cannot see intent. Ostrom on a commons no one owns. Rao on an orbit no one prices. Turing on machines no one can audit. Rubin on an evidence base no one has examined.

Drawn from a register of nearly nine thousand sources, the review walks the Hall chair by chair, preserving the great disputes rather than settling them. It closes with twelve research programmes the evidence now demands.

The claim of unprecedentedness, so beloved of space conferences, is usually a confession of an unvisited library. Here is the library, opened.

Nobody in orbit is self-made. A domain arguing about traffic rules, carrying capacities and the ethics of machines that decide is standing on four centuries of shoulders, whether or not it looks down.