Turning Dust to Gold: Building a Future on the Moon

Rutgers University Professor of Engineering Haym Benaroya set for himself no small challenge in writing this intriguing, ambitious, although ultimately unsatisfactory "history" of human space flight, as written by hypothetical "chief executive" Yerah Timoshenko around the time of the 200th anniversary of the Apollo landings on the Moon. The book's conceit is that a trove of missing documents from the early century of human exploration has been discovered in the late 22nd Century. These documents fill in gaps in the historical record of lunar settlement. Thus, future scholars are able to reconstruct humanity's faltering steps in exploring beyond the Earth. Writing to us from his lunar home in 2169, Timoshenko summarizes the political, engineering, management, and financial hurdles faced by advocates of human space flight a century and a half earlier. And, from that future perspective, extensive human settlement on the Moon, with a foothold on Mars, was made possible by humanity's desire to expand beyond the Earth and commercial development of putative lunar resources, hence the title of the book