How to Make a Spaceship


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, An Epic Race, And the Birth of Private Spaceflight is a bestselling award-winning 2016 non-fiction book by journalist Julian Guthrie about the origins of the X Prize Foundation and Peter Diamandis, the first X Prize, the Ansari X Prize and Anousheh Ansari, the entrants into that suborbital spaceflight competition, and the winning team, Mojave Aerospace Ventures of Vulcan Inc., Paul G. Allen, Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan, and their platform of Tier One of SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne.

Synopsis

The book is an overview of what lead to the creation of the X Prize, and the running of that first X Prize. Profiles of all the major players in the X Prize saga are included in the book. It chronologically starts with the influences that weighed upon Peter Diamandis, and his progression into the space industry. It also covers the process to get funding, rejections, and the arrival of the Ansaris, becoming title sponsors. The book surveys several of the teams that entered into the competition to win the Ansari X Prize. The team that is focused on most is that which won the X Prize in 2004, the one headed by Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, of SpaceShipOne. The book ends with an epilogue about Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic scooping up the SpaceShipOne technology, and the spaceplane itself ending up in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The book includes a preface by Richard Branson, and an afterword by Stephen Hawking.

Publication

The book was originally entitled Beyond: Peter Diamandis and the Adventure of Space, when it was sold preemptively to Penguin Books in 2014. How to Make a Spaceship was released in September 2016, in trade paperback, hardcover, audio book and e-book formats. The work was a finalist for a PEN Award, the 2017 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. The publication won the 2016 Eugene E. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature in September 2017. It became a New York Times listed bestseller. The book has appeared on several "Best Of" book lists. Several parties have expressed interest in obtaining the filming rights to the book.

Reception

Gregg Easterbrook's review in the Wall Street Journal said of the book that “How to Make a Spaceship offers a rousing anthem to the urge to explore."

Awards and honors