title: Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age
author:  Greg Klerkx 
description: In this sprawling and sometimes polemical account, Klerkx, formerly associated with the SETI Institute, excoriates what he sees as NASA's present-day loss of vision. During the Apollo program, NASA's goal was manned space exploration. But over the last 29 years, the agency has scaled down its vision, content to send unmanned missions to the other planets and keep human beings in earth orbit with the short-lived Skylab, the troubled shuttle fleet and the "money-gobbling" International Space Station. Klerkx draws out some of the threads in the tangled web that connects the perpetually feuding NASA fiefdoms, NASA's major suppliers (and major congressional contributors), like Boeing, and the politicians who write the checks. He believes that private-sector entrepreneurs will wrest future space exploration away from the self-serving NASA bureaucracy, which too often views space in terms of military and strategic applications. Klerkx presents the nouveaux riches businessmen investing millions in space-related projects, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, as well as eccentric visionaries like Robert Zubrin and his Mars Society. The Columbia disaster hangs over Klerkx's tale like a dark shadow.. Some readers may think Klerkx is still under the spell of his boyhood dream of being an astronaut and giving short shrift to arguments against human space exploration. But readers who share Klerkx's dream will be captivated by his vision of what needs to be done to resume manned space flights and of what humankind is capable of achieving. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Praise for Leaving Orbit
  
  
  “Wonderfully evocative…. Ms. Dean writes with the passion of a lifelong lover
  of space exploration and an ability to communicate, with tremendous kinetic
  power, the glory and danger of its missions.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York
  Times
  
  
  “A meditation on America’s waning age of manned spaceflight, this book is also
  about the craft of writing.”—The New Yorker
  
  
  “Sentimental and ferocious….[Dean] is, from the start, dynamite at enveloping
  the reader, ushering us back to an earlier state of wonder. You almost can’t
  help, while reading, walking outside and looking up at the sky again.”—Star
  Tribune (Minneapolis)
  
  
  “Thoughtful and provocative…. Mesmerizing…. Dean deftly captures the thrill
  and discovery of American space exploration.”—Publishers Weekly, starred
  review
  
  
  “One of those books you can’t put down, don’t want to finish, and won’t soon
  forget.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
  
  
  “Deep down, Leaving Orbit proposes, it really only wants on