A Traveler's Guide To The Stars
Les Johnson
Princeton University Press £22 • HB
Penned by the former head of NASA's turn-of-the-century Interstellar Propulsion Research Project, this is a concise book on a big topic: could (and should) we travel to another star? The book is dedicated to Gregory Matloff, co-author of The Starflight Handbook, the 1991 bible of interstellar travel. So do we really need another? Have there really been that many developments within just three decades?
The answer, writes Johnson, is yes. For a start, it was only during the 1990s that the first exoplanets were discovered, so starships finally have destinations to aim for, even if Earth-like exoplanets remain elusive. NASA and other institutions are studying probes
