BOB ZUBRIN TAKES NO PRISONERS IN HIS SCATHING REVIEW OF DANIEL DEUDNEY’S DUMB NEW BOOK OPPOSING SPACE EXPLORATION. Excerpt:

Deudney’s book contains over 200,000 words, and costs only $36 retail, so purchasers will be rewarded with over 5,500 words for every dollar spent, which is well above industry standards for new hardcover books. The writing style is sort of Germanic, but it is better than Hegel, so readers who enjoyed The Phenomenology of Mind should find it at least equally pleasurable. It is true that most of the material is filler, but levity is provided by many original technical errors sprinkled generously throughout the text. Deudney claims, for example, that the temperature of objects in Earth orbit is 300 degrees Centigrade, that bodies made of water will freeze “instantly” in deep space, that the limit of Earth’s gravitational field is 30,000 kilometers, that objects in space “must move fast or they will fall down,” and — contradicting Newton and Copernicus, respectively — that different laws of motion apply to objects on Earth and in space, and that there is a geographical boundary between Earth and space. (N.b.: Earth is in space.) Crusaders for emergency measures to upgrade elementary- and secondary-school science education will doubtless find much useful evidence here to buttress the importance and urgency of their cause.

Deudney appears to be in the grand tradition of people who claimed that Robert Goddard’s rockets couldn’t work in space because without an atmosphere there’s nothing to push against.

Plus: “The more serious problems with the book appear when we consider Deudney’s ideas.”