New book: Born to Explore - John Casani's Grand Tour of the Solar System

[Blackstar]

Due in December.

I'm very happy that somebody wrote this. I worked with Casani and he knew so much about planetary exploration. One of the greats.

[Oersted]

I tried to read Jay Gallantine's previous book "Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)" and it was apretty much unreadable because of his over-the-top explosive psychedelic prose. I suggest people try to read a sample of this one before deciding to get it.

From that book, a typical sentence: ""Then in 1956, around the same time an overworked George Ludwig sat sweating out his festering tape recorder, William Sinton came along and made a discovery of general interest. An enthusiastic American astronomer, Sinton's repetitively exhausting threesomes with Mars and spectrometers churned out quite a possibility: the big red ball could very well be awash in carbon and hydrogen. Jeepers!!"

If that's your thing, go ahead.

(Or we can hope the author toned it down...)

[Blackstar]

Any author who uses "Jeepers" and not one, but two exclamation marks, is suspect. Maybe not human.

[Jay-Gallentine]

Hi Everyone, I'm Jay - the author of Born to Explore as well as Ambassadors from Earth.

It means a lot to have people interested in and dialoguing about my work. If there are ever any questions, please feel free to reach out with whatever they might be.

Born to Explore is a pretty in-depth look at - and ultimately a celebration of - John Casani's life and career and fundamental philosophies. This runs basically in parallel with the story of the Galileo mission to Jupiter. (After reading that you may be asking yourself, "Well then why is Cassini on the cover?") It's a great question with a long-ish answer I can get into if people like.

Casani and I had been talking and meeting since 2007 and I was shocked nobody had ever done a book focusing on him. I think you'll like how it turned out.

And then regarding the William Sinton excerpt from Ambassadors, it's surely a little more on the spicy side of my phrases! My fundamental challenge is making things like historical spectrometer experiments sound interesting - which occasionally leads to the use of such terms as "threesomes." It's completely intentional. My intent is to engage readers, not push them away, and I'm sorry that little section didn't go over well with you.

With Very Best Regards, Jay Gallentine