'Astronauts For rent' is a accomplished and authoritative learn of the expanding want for advertisement astronauts. Erik Seedhouse offers particular insights into the burgeoning new box of industrial house operation and the people who will run those missions.

Section I starts via describing how Astronauts for rent (A4H) used to be created in 2010 by way of Brian Shiro, a hugely certified NASA astronaut candidate, and a bunch of alternative astronaut applicants. Erik introduces A4H's imaginative and prescient for commencing the gap frontier to advertisement astronauts and describes the tantalizing technology possibilities provided whilst suborbital and orbital journeys develop into regimen.

Section II describes the automobiles astronauts will use. Anticipation is at the upward push for the hot crop of business suborbital and orbital spaceships that may serve the medical and academic marketplace. those reusable rocket-propelled autos are anticipated to supply quickly, regimen, and cheap entry to the sting of house, in addition to the aptitude to hold study and academic team contributors. the fast turnaround of those autos is primary to knowing the profit-making strength of repeated sojourns by way of astronauts to suborbital and orbital heights.

Section III describes a number of the varieties of missions this new corps of astronauts will fly and who will lease them. for instance, suborbital flights can be used to do excessive altitude astronomy, lifestyles technological know-how experiments, and microgravity physics. This part maintains with an exam of the categories of missions that would speed up human growth outward, to Exploration category missions via lunar bases, the institution of interplanetary spaceports, and outposts at the floor of Mars. alongside how it describes the initiatives advertisement astronauts will practice, starting from mining asteroids to harvesting helium.