Review: Moonrush, by Dennis Wingo
SpaceExploration Monday, August 30, 2004 . This is a SciScoop post by apsmith
One of these days somebody will write a wildly popular book that
demolishes the mental boundaries our civilization has adopted
by ignoring space as a solution to Earthly problems. Dennis Wingo’s new book has many of the
ingredients such a book would need. Unfortunately, as the name
suggests, the book was rushed into print with too many glaring
errors to make the case convincingly.
Wingo, an engineering physics graduate of the University of Alabama
at Huntsville and founder of Skycorp, shows
his ambitions clearly in the cover illustration: 2 Skycorp astronauts and
a robot, prospecting together on the lunar surface.
The book’s focus is on the potential for, almost literally, a gold-rush
to the Moon that parallels the ones which helped settle the West.
In this case the precious metal is not gold, but platinum and its
relatives. These metals are critical to fuel cells, and Wingo spends
half a dozen early chapters tracing energy sources and our need to
replace oil as a transportation fuel; recent oil price spikes are
all the more relevant to his argument.
Drawing on recent studies of asteroid impacts and using an interesting
argument about relative impact velocities on the Moon, Wingo asserts
that plentiful quantities of platinum and related metals will be found
near a few percent of lunar craters. When (if) the hydrogen economy
hits full swing, lunar platinum may be critical to making it work.
Platinum isn’t the only reason people are interested in a lunar return.
To his credit, Wingo presents the case for a handful of other
justifications, from lunar solar power to scientific explorations.
One can question the credibility of the case for precious metals, but
this panoply of reasons for renewed lunar interest is in itself clear
motivation for us to return.
Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is a several-chapter
review of past efforts at lunar transport and mining architectures.
Ideas from the 1950s to the present day, including sections from the
June 2004 report of the presidential commission, demonstrate a variety of
practical approaches and the basic infrastructure requirements.
Wingo has his own lunar architecture of course. Unfortunately
it is already slightly out of date since the very recently
announced availability of Bigelow’s $100 million inflatable modules.
Moonrush has no bibliography or index, and only scattered footnotes.
The numerical tables and graphs would warm the heart of any
engineer, but are marred by the many grammatical and numerical
errors in tables and text. All the ones I found were minor, but jarring nonetheless.
Both author and publisher are acquaintances of mine – they promise
the problems will be fixed in a second printing. The book’s tone is
at times much more polemical than necessary, a fault that will
be harder to fix.
Wingo has adopted a slogan reprinted on the back cover: “We go to Mars to
take our civilzation there. We go to the Moon to save our civilization here.”
The author who will write the world-changing book we still need
would do well to read Moonrush first.
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5 Responses to Review: Moonrush, by Dennis Wingo
Anonymous
September 1st, 2004 at 6:05 pm
I responded to Art in Email about this.
1. The footnotes are hardly scattered. They are at the end of every chapter, some chapters with over 20 footnotes, all properly referenced.
2. As for index and footnotes, look at other Apogee books, they do not have them either. We may or may not add them in the future.
3. What is important about this book to me (I wrote it), is that we must discard the science based focus of NASA and look toward the broader economic context of expanding into the solar system. This book is not about SkyCorp (the only place that it is mentioned is the logo’s on the Astronauts and one picture credit.
Art has sent me a couple of the numercial errors but I have had a half a dozen people go over the book and there are no widespread grammatical errors.
I find it amazing that people will focus on minutae and not on the the core information presented in the book. I have had an incredible response from the general public in that I specifically wrote this in a language form accessable to people without a technical education.
One of the biggest problems in space advocacy is the tendency for us to eat our young and each other with pithy comments intended to puff up the writer while tearing down everyone else.
When I emaile Art about his mistake on the footnotes, his response was “well I only made that mistake.” Well Art we all make mistakes, however read the book for what it says, not for nits to pick.
Dennis Wingo
apsmith
September 1st, 2004 at 9:52 pm
Hi Dennis!
Hey, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it. But it’s far from perfect. You need a real copy-editor or English teacher (somebody like gypsysoul here – also a Huntsville resident) to go through it with a fine-toothed comb to at least get rid of the glaring stuff. And maybe that is nit-picky – but if you want to influence educated people, grammatical and typographical errors are a real turn-off. Details matter.
Here are some “scattered” examples:
“our”, “us”, “our” repetition… couldn’t you find a better way of starting the chapter?
“in and of itself” also a needless cliche
Well, I could go on – but I think a paid copy-editor would likely be a better bet – I’m just a techie after all!
You’re right that we are often too critical of one another. I’m glad you got the book out – despite its faults, I learned some things from it. And having written many much shorter things myself, I can see how hard it is to actually get something like this out the door… Good luck with the next one!
Anonymous
September 6th, 2004 at 1:06 am
Dennis Wingo has done what many of us have talked about doing – writing a book. As one of the people who has had the pleasure of knowing the man, and reading the book, it is sad that people are nit-picking the small stuff. As was said a few years back- “It’s the message, stupid!”
Mr. Wingo is one of the most brilliant men I have known- and “Moonrush” is not only a forecast of what MUST be done for mankind to survive, BUT it is also a warning that we must heed.
This book should be read by the political canidates and by the people who are searching for our future energy needs.
Well Done, Dennis
Dr. J. M. Busby
Anonymous
December 15th, 2004 at 3:15 am
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Blindmanbluff
April 11th, 2005 at 2:37 pm
I am a very non-technical average 53 year old American who has had a slightly more than casual interest in space travel and exploration. I found Dennis Wingo’s book to be an extremely informative and well-written view of what my children and grand children can expect of the future of civilization on Earth and above. As much as I understand the necessity for precision and detail required to accomplish the dreams and goals of mankind, I find it amusing that you all in the Space community waste your time over the detail of errors and omissions in this book and miss the point that it was intentionally written for us Dummies to become educated. Remember that it ultimately us, the uneducated voters, that will be making voting our representation in Washington and controlling the bucks. Come on you Academic Geekoids read this one for content and quit playing with your “Dangling Participles”. I expect that my grammar and sentence structure in this post has errors too but I bet you get the point. Tom Setchel