Book Review: Space Architecture for Engineers and Architects

space-architecture-coverThis is the second review I’ve written of a book by the author, Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger (hereafter SHM), and the third review I’ve written on this topic because it interests me. Space Architecture for Engineers and Architects: Designing and Planning Beyond Earth is similar to SHM’s last book, Architecture for Astronauts, in that it covers the still-in-its-infancy discipline of space architecture. And like her previous output, this book is a worthwhile addition to the aerospace’s collective knowledge. Continue reading “Book Review: Space Architecture for Engineers and Architects”

Book Review: The Princess Diarist












   The itsy bitsy spidered his way up my water spout
He little Jack Hornered his way into my corner
And now I can’t get him out
He at all my porridge, sat in my chair
Slept in my bed, washed himself into my hair




Book Review: Carrying Albert Home

The premise for Homer Hickam Jr.’s latest novel is intriguing enough to make you want to read it and hilarious enough that you expect to be entertained. Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator will do both. Hickam, best known for Rocket Boys (a.k.a. October Sky), has pieced together a love story based on stories his parents told him while he was growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia.

Years before Homer Hickam Senior and his wife Elsie raised their boys in a small mining town, they had other dreams, loves, ambitions, and adventures. Homer’s mother Elsie spent some time after graduating high school in what would be my future home town, Orlando, Florida. She lived with a “rich” uncle (who would eventually lose most of his money in the Depression) and fell in love with an up-and-coming actor and dancer named Buddy Ebsen. Yep, that Buddy Ebsen–he of later Jed Clampett/Beverly Hillbillies fame. Ebsen left Orlando for New York and later Hollywood to pursue his acting career. Elsie mooned over him, but eventually went back home to West Virginia to marry a boy she admired, Homer. As a wedding gift, Buddy sent an alligator from Florida, who became the Hickams’ pet, Albert.

If keeping a four-foot alligator in your bathroom and walking it around on a leash seems a tad odd, even dangerous, you probably wouldn’t be far wrong. That seems to be how Elsie Hickam lived her life. Eventually, Homer Sr. lays down the law and says, “It’s the alligator or me!” Elsie seems willing to accept Homer’s ultimatum, but only if he agrees to drive the gator back to Orlando to give him a decent home. What follows is a road trip that feels like a mashup of Forrest Gump, It Happened One Night, and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (more on him in a bit). In the pre-Interstate Highway era, long-distance travel across the U.S. was still a bit of a challenge, even with road maps, and Homer and Elsie get themselves into a series of adventures and predicaments as they make their way gradually southward to give Elsie’s alligator a home.

While the reader knows the eventual ending–the husband and wife will eventually settle in West Virginia and raise Homer Hickam, Jr.–you’re not certain how, and it certainly doesn’t seem like it will end up that way. If this book is a love story, it is also an exploration by Hickam of answering the question of “Who were my parents?” As Hickam put it when I reached out to him on Twitter, “It was a book I needed to write.”

Elsie does not like living in Coalwood and tries to convince Homer to escape with her. Barring that, she hopes to escape the coal-miner’s life with Homer. She’s strong-minded and up for any adventure. Her favorite saying seems to be, when an opportunity is presented to her, “I always wanted to be an X (nurse, pilot, actress, etc.),” and hijinks thereafter ensue. The adventure of Carrying Albert Home, then, is a story of two people struggling in a marriage with vastly different expectations for their lives. Homer, a serious, literal-minded coal miner, is happy to live, raise a family, and die in Coalwood. Elsie, who had spent time in secretarial school in sunny Florida, hopes for a more exciting, adventurous life with someone like the actor Buddy Ebsen.

Along the way from West Virginia to Florida, Homer’s future parents face dangers from bank robbers, moonshiners, labor disputes (with Homer taking one side and Elsie the other), minor-league baseball in the rural south, smugglers, and a few celebrities along the way, including Ernest Hemingway and the aforementioned John Steinbeck. All of this happens, with various twists, turns, and side trips while keeping Albert the alligator in tow and a mysterious rooster who joins them along the way. Elsie’s adventuring spirit and Homer’s diligence and doubt about his wife’s love move the story forward in the way common to many love stories. Instead of two single people seeking love, we experience instead two imperfect people struggling in their marriage.

I did note that this book appears in the fiction section (the subtitle includes, after all, “the mostly true story”), not the nonfiction section. This is a novel based on true-or-not stories Homer’s parents told him over the years. Perhaps they’re tall tales, perhaps they’re the real McCoy, but the individual adventures drive forward a love story that is worth reading because it involves real, married people. It’s a poignant reminder that struggles, challenges, and adventures are not just for courting but can and should continue after a couple becomes man and wife.

Mars in 2015–Books, Movies, and Reality

In the last month I’ve been indulging in a bit of Mars mania. I read Andy Weir’s book The Martian, followed by the movie starring Matt Damon, which was based upon the book. On the heels of this double helping of The Martian I read Rescue Mode, a new science fiction novel by Ben Bova and a NASA friend of mine, Les Johnson.

Both books go to superb lengths to achieve engineering realism in depicting hardware for getting to and living on Mars. The Martian focuses on one man who is stranded on the red planet while Rescue Mode concentrates on the efforts of a crew of eight astronauts whose vehicle is severely damaged on the way to Mars. Different problems, but same stakes: survival beyond the Earth.

The Martian 

The Martian is written entirely in the first person and the protagonist–portrayed well in the movie by Matt Damon–concentrates more on the lone astronaut’s Robinson Crusoe-type challenges with nature using the tools at hand. The movie gives more life to the characters “off screen” in the book. I found the book hilarious, probably because it was easy to identify with a sarcastic white guy who’s a Chicago Cubs fan and has an occasionally profane manner of expressing himself.

The movie version of astronaut Mark Watney is a bit more subdued, perhaps not quite as juvenile, but an admirable character nonetheless. In fact I’d go so far as to say that Matt Damon’s acting is excellent while the movie overall is simply good. The movie has some long stretches of just watching a rover move across the lonely Martian landscape. Or, as someone pointed out about The Lord of the Rings, just a lot of walking. The novel of The Martian needs to keep the reader engaged–in my case, I devoured the book in a couple of days–and so has a few more problems to solve. And there’s just more opportunity for smart remarks by the narrator.

Another thing Weir (and director Ridley Scott, to his credit) handles well is giving all the technology a real-world feel, complete with acronym-heavy jargon, rules and regulations, and a good feel not just for what things are designed to do but what they can be made to do in case of emergencies. Even duct tape makes a good showing.

Perhaps the biggest downside to being faithful to the book is that Weir’s (Watney’s) profanity does not make the movie exactly kid-friendly. S-bombs, F-bombs, cussing galore. Depending on how old your kids are and how much profanity they’re used to, they can probably start watching this film at around age 10-12 (the film is PG-13, though I’m surprised it didn’t make R). It’s not that I’m a huge prude when it comes to cussing, but that does mean limit the age range for kids to watch the story and get inspired by its can-do spirit. Regardless, the book and the movie are great fun and manage to capture an Apollo 13 level of what author David Brin calls “competence porn” set in space as Watney moves from bare survival to problem solving to transcending his situation. I might need to go back to the theaters for another shot at viewing it on the big screen. Worth it.

Rescue Mode

Rescue Mode, which to my knowledge isn’t being made into a movie yet, is a different project. It still features peril on a Mars mission and requires a lot of technological competence to put things right. However, instead of concentrating on one character’s efforts or point of view, Bova and Johnson write about a crew of eight: four men, four women, with a mix of nationalities and races, plus a variety of NASA people and politicians back on Earth. In this way, Rescue Mode is a more mature (in the literary sense), complex, and ambitious work.

The crew includes some rivalries, sexual tension, and personality clashes that add a bit of humanity to the astronauts. The Martian, by contrast, isn’t quite as diverse or nuanced–the primary motivation for most of the off-stage players is dedication to duty. On the whole, the character interactions are handled well, including some eye rolling by the other characters when one of them says something that might be taken as stereotypical in some fashion.

The book is a little slow to start as we’re introduced to the crew and the political players, but once the crew get into space, the pace picks up quickly. You might wonder what sort of political drama is included in a book ostensibly about space exploration. In this case, the authors chose to depict a battle in Washington, DC, over the continued funding of human space exploration, with the president for it and an ambitious senator trying to shut down the Mars program as “too dangerous” and “wasteful.”

One thing I found interesting in comparing The Martian and Rescue Mode is that both books seem to have used the same (or similar) NASA reports in designing their spacecraft and other hardware. Not surprising, I suppose–if NASA manages to get to Mars in the near future, realism demands that you use the hardware they say they’re going to use. Which brings me to a few concluding thoughts about Mars exploration in the real world of 2015.

Meanwhile, back in the real world…

Both of these books assume something that right now is not foreseeable, or maybe even realistic: the political will to spend the money and time to build all that NASA wants to build to get humans to Mars. The Martian just assumes that it happened without questioning the how or why. Rescue Mode takes a shot at explaining how it might be done with solid support from a U.S. President. Bova and Johnson note that their mission takes place late in the supporting president’s term and that the program would be vulnerable to the next president to come along–even if that president came from the same party. I don’t fault Andy Weir for this–he’s telling an rollicking good adventure story. Bova and Johnson wrote an adventure story but had larger fish to fry, as they try to make a larger political case for human spaceflight. Realistically, any actual future that includes a massive human mission to Mars or even back to the Moon will need to address the politics of it.

Another political point Rescue Mode makes is that the people most likely to benefit from closing or cutting back on NASA-led human space exploration would be commercial entities like SpaceX. Indeed, Elon Musk has stated that he wants to send people to Mars. The book includes a spaceport in New Mexico and makes reference to other commercial enterprises in Texas, Florida, and on the Moon. The real political battle over human spaceflight is not really between people who want it and those who want to close it down but between differing visions of how it should be carried out–and by whom: should the future glory go to NASA or a dedicated billionaire? The Martian doesn’t depict this battle per se, but it clearly stands behind NASA getting the job; Rescue Mode shows NASA having the job but facing pressure from others who would prefer that they don’t.

If it seems strange to be pro-space exploration but anti-NASA, it probably is–just as it’s strange that a Democrat administration is more supportive of commercial space while Republicans are favoring a large government program. However, if you spend some time observing the space business in the 21st century, you will see that we live in strange times. Welcome to the future.

Book Review: Aurora






The Memory of Whiteness link:


Mars Trilogy link:


2312 Link:








Or there’s this, from much later in the book:






Book Review and Literary Experiment II: The Emotional Thesaurus

English department creative writing majors have this dictum beaten into their skulls early and often: “Show, don’t tell.” Intellectually, I understood what the profs meant: describe situations rather than have the narrator explain what happens in a particular scene. However, it wasn’t until I read The Emotion Thesaurus that I understood how this dictum translated into actual writing practice.

[Click here if you want to buy the book: //]

Imagine you’ve got a very emotional story to tell. We all know how much emotion is internalized, in feelings or words. However, your publisher has dictated two important rules:

  1. Thou shalt not write interior monologues.
  2. Thou shalt not explain the meaning of an event in the narration.

I’ve been guilty of this for years, which is one of several reasons why I make my living as a technical writer, not a fiction writer. But here’s where those two rules force the writer to get better at his/her craft: if you can’t as Author explain how everything fits together, you have to depict the impact through characters’ dialogue, physical actions, or other descriptions of behavior. Again, the point of this approach to writing is that some of the burden of understanding the story is given over to the reader. Another advantage of this type of writing–should you be so inclined–is that it is much easier to translate “external” writing into TV or movie productions because everything is right there on the page.

On the flip side, stories that are very internalized or are overburdened with narrative explanation are notoriously difficult to translate into visual images. The only film I know that did a halfway decent job of this was Dune, which was a stinker on other levels, but captured the internal monologues of Frank Herbert’s cerebral series well.

What The Emotion Thesaurus does is provide the writer with a range of emotions, their definitions, physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, cues of long-term emotional effects, and cues to repressed emotion. Through all of these, the writer can better “method act” their characters into life through words alone. I found this visceral approach to “show, don’t tell” so worthwhile that this lesson alone was worth the price.


Not sure what I mean by show vs. tell? I’ll try an example to see if I can depict it honestly.

Jerry saw the news: Chicago nuked by terrorists. He couldn’t believe it: half his family–or more!–wiped out in the mother of all fires. And for what? He swore revenge right there and then.

Jerry turned on the TV, saw a wide-eyed reporter with pursed lips and watery eyes explain with a shaky voice, “…terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the destruction. First incorporated in 1837, the city of Chicago has been utterly obliterated by a high-power hydrogen bomb. The casualties…” The news reader choked up, paused, and composed herself. “At a guess, over five million people died in the initial blast. How many might be injured or suffering from radiation burns will take weeks or months to determine as emergency crews from neighboring cities attempt a rescue effort. Because of the electromagnetic pulse and the extent of the damage, we’re only getting fragmentary images, mostly from people in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Rockford, where damage was bad, but survivable.”

The images on the screen were shaky, but featured screaming voices, anguished cries, faces contorted with pain or burns so horrific that blur spots were insufficient to cover the blood or discolored flesh on the screen. “I must warn viewers, that some of the images you are about to see, are extremely disturbing….”

A spasm crossed Jerry’s face. He poked at the mute on the remote, then dropped it as his hands began to shake. He began reciting names as his eyes touched on every cherished face, young and old, and every familiar South Side apartment building, restaurant, and church in the pictures on his wall: “Momma. Daddy. Regina. DaSean. Malcolm. Mokeena. Auntie Jessie. Auntie Carmela….you bastards. You stupid, f—ing bastards!”

The crawl under the news reader’s face shared casualty figures, statements by the President, by Congress, FEMA, the Red Cross… “Who did it?” He shouted at the TV.

Teeth clenched, Jerry picked the remote off the floor and jabbed repeatedly at the mute until the sound came back on. “…nce again, the Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the attack, which is unprecedented in the history of terrorism and this country…”

Jerry’s lip turned up in a snarl. He spat at the screen, not caring about the mess. “Okay, that’s fine, you bastards. You’ve made up my mind for me. I will m-make it my mission in life to destroy you.”

But before he took any action in that direction, Jerry collapsed into his recliner and cried long and hard for the next two hours.


Obviously the “Tell” version is a lot shorter, but the “Show” version gives the reader more time to experience and feel the moment along with Jerry. We’re able to “see” Jerry’s character better. “Telling” is brief and, pardon the expression, bloodless. We don’t have a sense of the event nor of Jerry’s reaction to it. Okay, now I get it.

The trick becomes–will I get better or different stories out of this lesson? Time will tell.

Book Review: The Education of Millionaires

I bought this book because freelance writing has been fun, but a business challenge. The subtitle caught my eye: Everything You Won’t Learn in College About How to be Successful. Well, that wouldn’t be too hard. Between my English literature and technical writing degrees, I didn’t find a lot of time for real-world business skills. And that deficit in my college learning is what the author is trying to correct. I found his advice well worth reading.

Education of Millionaires

Using interviews with multiple millionaires or billionaires–most of whom dropped out of high school or college–Michael Ellsberg illustrates what he defines as seven “success skills” necessary to make money. I don’t think I’m giving away too many trade secrets by listing them here (it’s akin to opening the front matter in the book store and checking the table of contents).

  2. How to Find Great Mentors and Teacher, Connect with Powerful and Influential People and Build a World-Class Network
  3. What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Marketing, and How to Teach Yourself
  4. What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Sales, and How to Teach Yourself
  5. How to Invest for Success
  6. Build the Brand of You (or To Hell With Resumes!)
  7. The Entrepreneurial Mind-Set Versus the Employee Mind-Set

Those chapter titles might intrigue you or strike you as utter bilge. I was hooked because I’ve been in need of some concrete tips for months now. Unlike some of Ellsberg’s subjects, I did graduate, went back to school to get a higher degree, and that paid off in the form of better jobs and opportunities in the defense and space industries…at least up to the point where I got laid off. Left to myself, I could have looked for the next tech writing job in the want ads and remained in Huntsville. I decided it was time to take the leap, become self-employed, and do what I wanted to do. In that case, I handled chapter one.

Mentors I’ve got, though I keep looking around for advice from others when I think they can help.

Where I knew I needed help was in marketing and sales, which surprised me a bit since I’ve worked as a marketing guy for a good chunk of my career. However, Ellsberg inverts the usual model of enticing others to want a product you want to sell and focuses instead on identifying individual, personal needs and determining if and how your product/service can help. I wonder how that approach would work at NASA (“We don’t do marketing, we education and outreach”). Ellsberg recommends a couple other good books on how to do things like direct marketing and “high integrity” marketing, which focuses on an individual’s deepest emotional needs without manipulating them into something they don’t want to buy. On the sales side of things, Ellsberg’s book might be worth it just for his referral to the book SPIN Selling, which is the cheapest abridged version of a million-dollar sales study you’re likely to find.

Ellsberg’s definition of investing for success might lead one to think he’s about to provide investment tips for your portfolio. Instead, he focuses on investing in your own ad hoc education–learning what you need to learn to run your business and succeed.

On the subject of brand building, I was already there: he emphasizes building a positive online presence. Google my name, and you get either me or a minor league baseball player. Most of the rest of the top ten entries, however, are me. So that’s good, I suppose. But until last night, I didn’t have the “” domain. The things I do for business development. If the author has one key message here, it’s that most of the jobs that are filled are not posted online, and yet that’s how most people do their job hunt–silly, no?

Lastly, when it comes to the “entrepreneurial mindset” vs. the “employee mindset,” I’d have to say that this has been the biggest change I’ve had to make to progress as a professional. What’s the difference? An entrepreneur is not too proud to take a scut job on the way toward something better. They’re looking at the job as a learning opportunity while they’re working on getting somewhere else. An entrepreneur looks at any downturns or unpleasant circumstances as temporary, not as permanent, inevitable, or the result of some big conspiracy to “keep a hard worker down.” Someone with an employee mindset, according to Ellsberg, is essentially in the perpetual role of the supplicant and looking to others’ goodwill for income and advancement. To think entrepreneurially–even in an employee role–means to seek out ways to make changes and improvements within (or event beyond) your authority, to seek out greater responsibility, and to constantly seek opportunities to improve themselves or the workplace. I didn’t stop thinking like an employee until my smart mouth got me a writeup and I realized I had to shape up or I was going to be stuck in that job or something like it forever.

So when you add all this insight and the many rags-to-riches stories together, you find yourself with a lot of insights into how diverse individuals can work themselves out of a job and into a career. Along the way, you’re treated to some great resources for improving yourself. I commend Ellsberg for not writing a get-rich-quick book or, worse, a get-rich-through-positive-thinking book. Ellsberg makes it clear that the educational and entrepreneurial processes require work, time, patience, and commitment. He also makes it clear that entrepreneurship does not require a college education. Much of the epilogue and later-version follow-up notes respond to criticism from people in the academics-are-required-for-success community, and he hits you with a lot of horrifying statistics about the amount of money spent on higher education compared to return on investment. The results are depressing and a little scary. Ellsberg compares the academic system to the housing bubble, with “investments” turning into mere consumable commodities.

I accepted the credential game, going for an M.A. to prove that I could speak technology (my experience up to that point had been Disney and English lit), and the bet worked. I paid off my loans in a reasonable amount of time because I was attending a state school in Florida, not an Ivy League university, like Ellsberg and many of his interviewees. Still, as a freelancer now, I’m not waving the diploma around as a way to drum up business–I focus on the work I’ve done and can do. Obviously there are some other things I need to work on, but clearly I was a good target audience for this book. I loved it and plan on recommending it to a couple friends as well as my sister and brother-in-law as food for thought when raising their kids. Do they really need college to succeed in an uncertain future? Maybe. But they also need the “street smarts” to start a business, something that our current education system just does not do. If you want to identify the basics, this book is a good place to start.