Michael Belfiore began his career writing about the new space age in 2004, when he covered the launch of the first privately built spaceship for the New York Post. Since then he has written about the private spaceflight industry for Reuters, Wired.com, and other outlets, including Popular Science, for which he has written numerous feature articles.
His book Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007) is the first book to chronicle the birth of the commercial space age. His blog, Dispatches from the Final Frontier, is a well-regarded source of news and commentary about the industry.
He became a full-time writer in 1995, first working as a freelance technical writer for the software industry, and then moving into the business world as a public relations writer for large corporations, still with a focus on technology.
He has also written scores of biographical encyclopedia entries on astronauts, business people, politicians, and other news makers for half a dozen reference publications from The Gale Group. His book Life Aboard a Space Station, published by Lucent Books in 2004, describes the experience of living and working in space for young readers.
Michael was born in 1969, the year of the first moon landing, and he has been a space enthusiast since the age of six, when he read his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein. He lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, fellow writer Wendy Kagan, and their daughter Amelie.
