Even as President Barack Obama calls on NASA to develop "game-changing" technologies, the space agency is undeniably in decline. In 2010, the country continues to shrink its space ambition, as it has since the early 1990s. The American era of manned spaceflight is essentially over. In "Falling Back to Earth," author Mark Albrecht, Ph.D., former executive secretary of the National Space Council, argues that this decay was triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. His firsthand account charts the end of the space race, which effectively ended large-scale government science initiatives and led to the decline of aerospace and defense industries.
