Future Spacecraft Propulsion Systems and Integration: Enabling Technologies for Space Exploration (Springer Praxis Books)

This is THE book for the future of Humanity. What does it take for humankind to set up infrastructure in space and become a Solar civilization? I you will find the answers herein. Dr. Paul Czysz was principle investigator for many projects within McDonnell Douglas and the hypersonic steering committees at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and remarked that he had strange calls in the middle of the night from people who told him, “I used to work for you, and I’m standing next to an aircraft that you’d recognize.” Involved in numerous programs such as the X-7, TAV, FDL-7C, MOL, he later became the Chief Scientist for the X-30 National Aero-Space Plane, a joint effort by NASA, DOD, and industry to build a hypersonic space plane. He is considered the father of hypersonic space access, with contemporaries such as Dr. Claudio Bruno, European Chair of the NATO group on scramjet propulsion. Dr. Bernd Chudoba is quite literally the successor to the Dr. Czysz legacy and library, responsible for creating the advanced Aerospace Design Vehicle laboratory at University of Texas Arlington. Dr. Chudoba has 30 years of experience in the areas of hypersonic aircraft and space vehicles, with a multidisciplinary complexity inherent in unconventional vehicle applications. He has worked with Airbus, Fairchild, Boeing, Mitsubishi, NASA, AFRL, ESA, USAF, and DARPA providing first-hand insights into past, present, and future aerospace systems development and integration. If you want to have an unbiased perspective on space travel, this is definitely the book for you.

This book is a valuable source of information for aerospace vehicle design enthusiasts, students of aerospace engineering, and futurists seeking to expand our frontier through the advancement of enabling technologies to assist space exploration. The authors have done a fantastic job of systematically stepping through the entire storyline starting with an explanation of the current challenges impeding interstellar travel, describing our current capabilities, and then diving deep into technological considerations to help mitigate this issue in the future for different types of space travel. Of note are some of the knowledge figures in chapter 3 which compare different vehicle configurations in a single snapshot image, expertly produced to aid in design decision-making. Overall, highly recommend!

Nine chapters in this well-written and organized work describe the process of overall space transportation system design integration. The Third Edition provides in-depth coverage of space transportation system analysis and design for the entire range of missions, including near-Earth applications, the Earth-Moon system, the Solar System, and even Stellar and Interstellar Precursor missions. The book is an excellent reference source for the professional, and is a valuable supplementary textbook for graduate-level or senior aerospace engineering courses.