America S Space Futures

America's Space Futures is an important contribution to the ongoing debate about space policy, the American space program, and the human destiny in space. It lays out alternative paradigms and frameworks for assessing America's future in space and how different visions would require changes to America's current approach to space development and exploration. Since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s, the U.S. civil space program has accomplished a great number of things: from deploying orbital observatories that see into deep space and exploring objects around the solar system robotically to studying the earth and building the International Space Station, perhaps the most challenging engineering feat ever achieved by man. Yet, the program frequently finds itself adrift when these missions come to an end. Consequently, space experts have long worried that the sum total of NASA's accomplishments is somehow still less than the total value of its component parts. Policymakers respond by establishing national commissions and expert panels to help lay out a long-term guiding vision for the space program. From the National Commission on Space in the 1980s, through 1990's Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, to the National Research Council in 2012, panel after panel has bemoaned the lack of a unifying vision for the space program. Unable to sustain such a vision over the course of several Presidential administrations, the White House and Congress have papered over the uncertainty with compromises that sometimes leave NASA working against itself and no one satisfied. In 2013, The Space Foundation, one of the United States' largest space education organizations, insisted "NASA needs to embrace a singular, unambiguous purpose that leverages its core strengths and provides a clear direction for prioritizing tasks and assigning resources." America's Space Futures responds by considering the costs, benefits, and risks of different visions for the American space program. Contributors, who all have years of experience working on space issues from a variety of perspectives--civil, commercial, military, intelligence, academic, and advocacy--offer out-of-the-box thinking and analyses that lays out a space future and sets priorities to achieve a specific national goal. These include space commerce and commercialization, maximizing American soft power through international space cooperation, settling the solar system, and advancing the frontiers of technology. Their goal is to raise new ideas, sharpen differences rather than blur them, and establish better foundations for setting the space program on a path for a brighter future. Essayists include: William B. Adkins, president of Adkins Strategies and an aerospace engineer with experience in the civil and national security space communities; Charles M. Miller, President of NextGen Space, a space entrepreneur and former NASA Senior Advisor for Commercial Space; Dr. Scott D. Pace, Director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute and a former senior official at NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Sterner, a Fellow at the George C. Marshall Institute, adjunct professor at Missouri State University, and a former senior official at NASA and the House Science and Armed Services Committees; and, Dr. James A. Vedda, a senior policy analyst at the Aerospace Corporation with years of experience in the Department of Defense, author of two books on the space program, and a former associate professor at the University of North Dakota.

As civil space policies and programs have evolved, the geopolitical environment has changed dramatically. Although the U.S. space program was originally driven in large part by competition with the Soviet Union, the nation now finds itself in a post-Cold War world in which many nations have established, or are aspiring to develop, independent space capabilities. Furthermore discoveries from developments in the first 50 years of the space age have led to an explosion of scientific and engineering knowledge and practical applications of space technology. The private sector has also been developing, fielding, and expanding the commercial use of space-based technology and systems. Recognizing the new national and international context for space activities, America's Future in Space is meant to advise the nation on key goals and critical issues in 21st century U.S. civil space policy.

As civil space policies and programs have evolved, the geopolitical environment has changed dramatically. Although the U.S. space program was originally driven in large part by competition with the Soviet Union, the nation now finds itself in a post-Cold War world in which many nations have established, or are aspiring to develop, independent space capabilities. Furthermore discoveries from developments in the first 50 years of the space age have led to an explosion of scientific and engineering knowledge and practical applications of space technology. The private sector has also been developing, fielding, and expanding the commercial use of space-based technology and systems. Recognizing the new national and international context for space activities, America's Future in Space is meant to advise the nation on key goals and critical issues in 21st century U.S. civil space policy.

For millennia, the rituals of death and remembrance have been fixed by time and location, but in the twenty-first century, grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. Today, the dead live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at any time. This dramatic cultural shift has made the physical presence of death secondary to the psychological experience of mourning. Virtual Afterlives investigates emerging popular bereavement traditions. Author Candi K. Cann examines new forms of grieving and evaluates how religion and the funeral industry have both contributed to mourning rituals despite their limited ability to remedy grief. As grieving traditions and locations shift, people are discovering new ways to memorialize their loved ones. Bodiless and spontaneous memorials like those at the sites of the shootings in Aurora and Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as roadside memorials, car decals, and tattoos are contributing to a new bereavement language that crosses national boundaries and culture-specific perceptions of death. Examining mourning practices in the United States in comparison to the broader background of practices in Asia and Latin America, Virtual Afterlives seeks to resituate death as a part of life and mourning as a unifying process that helps to create identities and narratives for communities. As technology changes the ways in which we experience death, this engaging study explores the culture of bereavement and the ways in which it, too, is being significantly transformed.