Michael Belfiore

Early in the morning of June 21, 2004, a new space age dawned. That's when a hand-built craft the size of a minivan rocketed the first commercial astronaut into space.

SpaceShipOne was built by a small company in the Mojave Desert for the price of a low-budget Hollywood movie. Now that it's broken the government monopoly on human spaceflight, the sky's no longer the limit on where a dream can take you.

Rocketeers chronicles the beginning of the second space age, one powered by private enterprise rather than government programs. From the first privately funded manned spaceflights to the building of the first commercial spaceports and space stations, Rocketeers presents the inside story of a new industry that might just change the world.

Journalist Michael Belfiore takes readers into the rocket shops of PayPal founder Elon Musk (whose Space Exploration Technologies has already built the fastest, highest-flying private rockets), Las Vegas real estate developer Robert Bigelow (now busily launching inflatable space habitats through his Bigelow Aerospace), and hot-shot game programmer John Carmack (building "vertical dragsters" in his spare time with his Armadillo Aerospace)—to name a few—for an eye-popping and entertaining look at the emerging business of space travel.

How did Scaled Composites beat NASA back to space for a measly twenty-five million bucks? Why do the likes of Virgin chief Richard Branson, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos think space is the Next Big Thing? How can affordable space travel help solve our problems here on Earth? Who's willing to pay $200,000 to ride a rocketized business jet to outer space? When can you buy a space ticket for the price of an econocar? Find out in Rocketeers.

Michael Belfiore covered the first privately funded spaceshots in 2004 for the New York Post and Reuters and has written about the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry for New Scientist, Wired.com, Popular Science, and other outlets. His blog Dispatches from the Final Frontier has become a well-regarded source of news and commentary about the people and machines opening space to private citizens.