posted March 02, 2010 02:11 AM               

Burt Rutan's Race to Space chronicles how Burt Rutan has brought the world to the brink of affordable private space travel in the first complete visual record of his hundreds of designs, world records, and elite honors. Included are more than forty aircraft and spacecraft that have successfully flown with the help of his fellow pioneers, from innovative designers to courageous test pilots.

• Hardcover: 160 pages
  
• Publisher: Zenith Press; First edition (November 15, 2010 July 7, 2011)
  
• Language: English
  
• ISBN-10: 0760338159
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0760338155

posted July 26, 2011 10:14 AM               

Burt Rutan's Race to Space is not a detailed history of all the aircraft developed by Rutan; Linehan in particular skims through many of the vehicles developed in the 1980s and 1990s to get to his space vehicles. Nor is the book a biography of Rutan, as Linehan focuses primarily on Rutan's professional work.

Instead, the book offers an overview of Rutan's design achievements over the years, a sampling of the unconventional approaches that won him acclaim. Linehan does a good job not getting too technical, providing backgrounds on topics ranging from how airplanes stall to the various kinds of rocket engines to keep the book accessible to broader audiences.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photos and illustrations, some provided directly by Scaled and Rutan, who also sat with Linehan for several interviews...