Publisher Spotlight: Jeff Foust, The Space Review

You’re probably familiar with the 1866 Jules Verne Science fiction story, From the Earth to the Moon, which anticipated the manned space program by nearly a century. In the story, you’ll recall, three Americans build an enormous cannon and fire a projectile—with themselves inside—that flies all the way around the moon and “splashes down” back on earth a few days later. In between, adventure ensues.

It’s a classic tale, one that has inspired many riffs, including the 1902 French film, Le Voyage dans la Lune and the attraction Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune at Disneyland Paris. But did you know that it’s actually possible to fire a projectile into space? Not only that, but did you know that a group of young entrepreneurs out of MIT are planning to build a modern version of Verne’s mighty “Columbiad” space canon to blast unmanned satellites into orbit?

You would know it if you read The Space Review, a weekly, blog-style webzine devoted to the technology, politics and business of space exploration. The Space Review is produced and edited by Jeff Foust, a member of the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Jeff is a real publisher’s publisher, a person who has turned his passion into a part-time business using freely available, open-source technology and a contributor base of knowledgeable and like-minded enthusiasts. I recently spoke with Jeff about his passion and about web publishing.

M2: I’m a huge space nut myself, and have been since I first watched men walk on the moon on TV when I was a kid. What got you excited about space?
Jeff: There was no “eureka” moment. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in space, be it from watching Star Trek reruns or the movie Star Wars at a young, impressionable age, or something else entirely. I think I perceived space exploration as the future, and wanted to learn as much about the future as I could; that’s what got me hooked.

M2: What is your background in aerospace?
Jeff: I work as a space industry analyst for the Futron Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland. Since I deal with a variety of space industry issues, there’s a lot of cross-fertilization between my work and my writing. Some of the work I do generates ideas for future articles, while the articles that I and others write help inform me in my work.

M2: So why start The Space Review?
Jeff: I have a long history, relatively speaking, in online publishing on space topics. In 1993 I took over SpaceViews, a newsletter of the Boston chapter of the National Space Society. Over the years I built up the online readership.

One of the things that set SpaceViews apart was the long-form feature articles on various space topics that were difficult to find elsewhere. There’s a lot of space news online, but few feature articles.

Eventually I spun off SpaceViews and sold it to a start-up company in the late 1990s.
I thought in the years after SpaceViews that a new online publication devoted exclusively to these feature articles on space topics, as opposed to news, could find a niche in the market.

M2: So what “pushed you over the edge,” so to speak, to launch (pun intended) The Space Review?
Jeff: It was the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy in February 2003. It was clear to me that a publication like this was needed now more than ever before, given all the attention that was being given to the future of the space program, and space exploration and space development in general. With that motivation, it didn’t take much time for The Space Review to get up and running.

M2: What had changed that allowed you to publish online so fast?

 
Jeff: The barriers to entry for new publishers are lower now than ever before, at least from a financial and technical standpoint. While you can certainly spend large sums of money to launch a new publication, thanks to low-cost web servers and free content management systems, it’s easy for a single person to start a new publication, be it a blog or a more structured publication, in very little time and at very little expense. The biggest obstacle is no longer how you’re going to publish, but what you’re going to publish, and why—finding your voice in an increasingly crowded world.

M2: Speaking of content, where do you get yours from?
Jeff: I have a group of regular contributors with a variety of backgrounds, from journalism to history, who regularly provide articles. I also get a lot of submissions over the transom, so the speak, from a wide range of people: students, entrepreneurs, scientists and so forth.

M2: Where do you want take Space Review?
Jeff: I really want to keep doing more of the same: insightful, enlightening, even provocative commentary on the major space topics of the day. Over time it may evolve from a weekly publication to twice a week or some other higher frequency, depending on the number of articles.

On of the things I learned from reading The Space Review was that last month, July, 2007, marked what would have been the 100th birthday of the science fiction great, Robert A. Heinlein, author of such genre classics as Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land. An intellectual libertarian and a rugged individualist, Heinlein’s futures-in-space were populated by courageous pioneers bent on opening the high frontier—because they had to; because it was there. Heinlein would have got on well with those space-gun building fellows from MIT and with Jeff Foust, who is bringing the “final frontier” to the digital frontier, and helping make the Web more informative and beneficial for all.

—Major Tom