Michael Belfiore became a freelance journalist in 2004, when he covered the launch of the first privately built spaceship for the New York Post and Reuters. Since then he has written about spaceflight and advanced technology for Popular Science, New Scientist, Wired.com, Air & Space Smithsonian, Financial Times, and other outlets.
He has also appeared as a commentator on the Fox Business Network, CTV's Canada AM, NPR's Marketplace, Showtime's Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, and on radio programs across the United States.
Michael's book Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007) is the first book to chronicle the birth of the commercial space age. His blog, Dispatches from the Final Frontier, is a well-regarded source of news and commentary about the industry.
His forthcoming book about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Smithsonian Books, 2009) will be the first book to go behind the scenes at the Pentagon agency that gave us the Internet, the Global Positioning System, and many other breakthrough technologies that have changed our lives for the better.
Michael became a full-time writer in 1995, first working as a freelance technical writer for the software industry, and then moving into the business world as a public relations writer for large corporations, still with a focus on technology.
He has also written scores of biographical encyclopedia entries on astronauts, business people, politicians, and other news makers for half a dozen reference publications from The Gale Group. His book Life Aboard a Space Station, published by Lucent Books in 2004, describes the experience of living and working in space for young readers.
Michael was born in 1969, the year of the first moon landing, and he has been a space enthusiast since the age of six, when he read his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein. He lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, fellow writer Wendy Kagan, and their daughter Amelie.
