C'mon, give them a break. You picked out the criticisms, the review had some good things to say. For example:

"While New Moon Rising is not a perfect book, it does provide the best insight yet into the formation of the new space exploration vision and why that vision was important to a space agency that was casting about for a new direction."

Hopefully it will do well enough, as Jeff Foust suggests, to get the errors corrected. Overall, I think they did pretty good for a "instant book".

Other excerpts from the review:

"Despite the central role of these policy-making efforts to the book’s theme, and the great interest in them by the space community and the broader public, these sections comprise only a very small portion of the 280-page book: the chapter on the policy deliberations spans just ten pages, while the other on the President’s approval of the vision and its rollout takes up 21 pages. (The two chapters, oddly, are not adjacent to each other but are separated by a chapter that describes in detail a number of failed efforts, from the X-33 to the Orbital Space Plane, to develop a successor to the shuttle.)"

and

"Some of the material is recycled from articles published on Cowing’s web sites, NASA Watch and SpaceRef.com: an extended description of Goldin’s retirement dinner, extending across several pages early in the book, is taken directly from an article Cowing wrote for SpaceRef in December 2023."

And my favorite:

"Along with the typographical errors are a few factual errors...Most of these errors are minor, but a few are more significant. The authors refer to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study in the spring of this year that estimated the cost of returning humans to the Moon to be $64 billion. In fact, while that figure is used in the CRS report, it is simply repeating NASA’s own internal estimate; the exploration plan at that time (as it is today) insufficiently defined to permit a detailed independent cost estimate."

So basically Cowing & Sietzen are falling into the same trap of lazy journalism that all the others reporting on the "$1 trillion" cost for Moon-Mars are falling into. But I've known about Cowing's "journalism skillz" for years.

Nevertheless, I agree it's probably worth a read, if nothing else to get more insight into the internal process. It's just too bad that Cowing's thirst for fame and amateurishness get in the way of telling a good story. I'll be waiting for my library or used bookstore to get a copy.

I think Amazon.com already has second-hand copies for sale. Take a look at ABEBooks.com, you'll probably do better price-wise than Amazon.com.

Interestingly enough, Keith Cowling has posted in the comments section of the Space Politics blog, see:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/000271.html

According to his comments, the typos "and other snafus" were fixed in the final galley edit, but for some reason did not make it into the book. There was supposed to be an index, but one did not show up.

Isaac Asimov has a long series of comments in one of his autobiographies about indexes. They appear to be a bone of contention between authors and publishers for decades (if not centuries).

Hi..This may be in the neiborhood of " conjecture " but what if all the hype on the revamping of NASA is just a smoke-screen on what is really going on..Something that only the "higher-ups " in government knows about..I mean what if the US is taking a page from the past on secrecy from other nations surrounding the Space Program...What if there is already a CEV developed and we don't know about it yet...Look at the F-111 and the SR-71...I had this conversation with a person who used to work in Washington and what he said started to make sense.....Jimo could already be powered by a nuclear engine already built...Lets not forget about the " Black Budget"....that is where all the good stuff is funded.......So its food for thought.......any comments.....?..Jake

"Nevertheless, I agree it's probably worth a read, if nothing else to get more insight into the internal process. It's just too bad that Cowing's thirst for fame and amateurishness get in the way of telling a good story. I'll be waiting for my library or used bookstore to get a copy."

So James, if you've not read it how do you comment on it?

I HAVE read it, got my copy Saturday. It's a good read.

O.K., I'm reading it...and it's so/so. My problems are the very short-jumpy-paragraph style. This might be well suited for blogs or news writing, but it is not so well suited for a book.

The book is better as an outline than a book. There are many areas where they need to flesh out what they are talking about. You need more background on the people they talk about, the history behind various projects, etc.

Maybe Version 2.0 will do a better job (and have an index!).

Still reading, probably about 3/4 done.

It bugs me: A lot of it is really good, interesting reading. But then you want to know more--more background, more about the personalities involved, etc.

I'm thinking it's a proposal for a screenplay now (in terms of style).

Haven't looked at the CD-ROM yet.

I have not read New Moon Rising yet, but I have skimmed through it a few times at the bookstore. One thing I can already tell is that this book is going to suffer only because it was released so quick. Project Constellation is going to be changing and new ideas will come out every month. Maybe 6 months to a year from now, some of that information will be outdated. However, there is stuff in that book that won't become outdated and that is how Project Constellation was started. Those are my only opinions about this book as of now, when I do get the chance to read it, I will probably have a few more.