This book provides a broad set of information and data on the rise of private actors in the space sector, organized into different topics covering the various trends that have shaped the space sector during the last decade. The book, written in a descriptive fashion, concludes with recommendations for future analytical research on the topic.

Siân Lincoln considers the use, role and significance of private spaces in the lives of young people. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, she explores the place of 'the private' in youth cultural discourses, both historically and contemporarily, that until now have remained largely absent in youth cultural research.

From entrepreneurs planning to turn mass space travel into a money-making opportunity to a science fiction author arguing against the privatization of space, 22 people involved in the plans for the future private uses of space travel and colonization are interviewed by space industry observer Berinstein. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This volume examines how people deal with information in a computerized environment, looking at what happens when people actively explore information space looking for objects without specific goals in mind. The topics are particularly relevant to the industrial application of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) techniques, especially with regard to teleworking and virtual organizations. This volume will be useful for researchers interested in human computer interaction, virtual communities, and information visualization.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current space exploration in terms of geopolitical and commercial aspects. Despite multiple attempts to foster commercial activities in the field of space exploration, for decades the domain largely continued to be funded and led by governments in the form of national and international programmes. However, the situation changed with the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the introduction of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme, which employed an innovative procurement scheme based on competitive, performance-based, fixed-price milestones. The success of this programme marked an important milestone in the evolution of the relationship between government and industry. The growing opportunities for private actors to make more prominent contributions to space exploration also lie in the “New Space” ecosystem, a sectoral transformation characterised by a substantial increase in private investment and the emergence of commercial efforts to develop disruptive concepts and address new markets.

Social navigation is an emerging field which examines how we navigate information or locate services in both real and virtual environments and how we interact with and use others to find our way in information spaces. It has led to new ways of thinking about how we design information spaces and how we address usability issues, particularly in collaborative, web-based systems. This book follows on from Munro et al, Social Navigation of Information Space, which was the first major work in this field. It provides a similar broad overview of the field, but is much more practical in focus.