Solar Sails / Springer Praxis Books (PDF)

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he serves as the Senior Technical Advisor for the Advanced Concepts Office.  He was a Co-Investigator on the Japanese T-Rex space tether experiment, the Principal Investigator of the NASA ProSEDS mission, and the first manager of NASA's In-Space Propulsion Technology Project.  He holds three patents and was thrice awarded NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal.  He is a TEDx speaker, was the featured "interstellar explorer" in National Geographic's January 2013 issue, and a member of the Advisory Board for The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.  Les and his wife, Carol, have two children and live in Madison, Alabama (a satellite community of Huntsville - the original "Rocket City, USA!").

Greg Matloff  is a leading expert in possibilities for interstellar propulsion , especially  near-Sun solar-sail trajectories that might ultimately enable interstellar travel, and is an astronomy professor with the physics department of New York City College of Technology, CUNY, a consultant with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, a Hayden Associate of the American Museum of Natural History and a Member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He co-authored with Les Johnson of NASA and C Bangs Paradise Regained (2009), Living Off the Land in Space (2007) and has authored Deep-Space Probes (edition 1: 2000 and edition 2: 2005).  As well as authoring More Telescope Power (2002), Telescope Power (1993), The Urban Astronomer (1991), he co-authored with Eugene Mallove The Starflight Handbook. (1989). His papers on interstellar travel, the search for extraterrestrial artifacts, and methods of protecting Earth from asteroid impacts have been published in JBIS, Acta Astronautica, Spaceflight, ,Space Technology,  Journal of Astronautical Sciences, and Mercury. His popular articleshave appeared in many publications, including Analog and IEEE Spectrum. In 1998, he won a $5000 prize in the international essay contest on ETI sponsored by the National Institute for Discovery Science. . He served on a November 2007 panel organized by Seed magazine to brief Congressional staff on the possibilities of a sustainable, meaningful space program. Professor Matloff is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. He has chaired many technical sessions and is listed in numerous volumes of Who's Who. In 2008, he was honored  as Scholar on Campus at New York City College of Technology.  In addition to his interstellar-travel research, he has contributed to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), modeling studies of human effects on Earth's atmosphere, interplanetary exploration concept analysis, alternative energy, in-space navigation, and the search for extrasolar planets.