Why is it that The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution is now in its third edition? As the author, I am grateful for the fact that my life's work has survived for nearly 30 years, when it has never sold a lot of copies and has not been heavily promoted or marketed.

In the next few blog posts, I am going to share with you some of my thoughts on this subject, because I believe that the answers point to something much larger than the book, or me, or the dramatic changes in the publishing industry that have taken place over the past three decades.

My initial thought is this: the book continues to be useful, and therefore to be published, because the astronaut interviews are valuable in a timeless way. Here we have, in a Q&A format, descriptions by 29 people who have experienced something remarkable: seeing the Earth and the universe from space and in space. I am willing to grant that everything I have written in the first two sections of the book may turn out to be wrong or incomplete. However, these interviews will be useful in the present for those who want to understand the spaceflight experience, and in the future as an important historical record of a unique moment in the history of our planet and our species.

I invite you to read just a few of these interviews and let me know if you agree. The book is available at:

www.aiaa.org or www. amazon.com