Fifty Years on the Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and More, Farquhar, Robert W

Robert W. Farquhar

Foreword by Roger-Maurice Bonnet

An autobiographical account of one mans 50-year career in creating, selling, designing, and implementing deep-space missions. The book tells the story of how the author was able to achieve several important space firsts despite difficult technical, management, and programmatic hurdles. These firsts include the following:

* First libration-point mission, ISEE-3 (1978) * First exploration of Earths distant magnetotail, ISEE-3 (1983) * First comet encounter, ICE (1985) * First asteroid orbiter, NEAR Shoemaker (2000) * First landing on an asteroid, NEAR Shoemaker (2001) * First orbiter of Mercury, MESSENGER (2011) First flyby of Pluto/Charon, New Horizons (2015)

* At the beginning of his career, the author was motivated by a driving ambition to design and implement the first mission to a libration point. This aspiration resulted in the placement of the ISEE-3 spacecraft into a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L1 libration point. By successfully demonstrating the utility and practicality of libration-point orbits, ISEE-3 prepared the way for a number of follow-on missions including SOHO, ACE, MAP, Genesis, Herschel/Planck, and JWST. The authors advocacy of libration-point staging for human missions to the Moon and beyond is also discussed.