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Perhaps we could develop a full-blown chapter by getting everyone involved just to see how well it takes shape, as well as, tell us how much effort was required. I would be happy to list the section and sub-section titles, then we will wait and see who will sign-up to write these sections. Someone with teaching skills could assign the tasks accordingly and then get it compiled into a coherent chapter. If it looks great and it is clear we could do a dozen more without worrying about losing our text writers, then, perhaps, the course could begin. Or, we could do most, or even all, the chapters here and then start the class.
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Here is an alternative idea for a text book, but in that vein. It's less than perfect, but it doesn't require an inordinately huge investment of effort by the course instructors.
The instructors come up with the topics to be covered in the course. For instance, chapter 1 could be basic physical principles. The sub-topics would be, perhaps, classical kinematics, dynamics, gravity, and orbital mechanics. (Maybe that's too broad for a single chapter, but you get the idea.) Then, each student is assigned a small paper on one of these topics -- do some research, describe what the topic is, and present the ideas. Once those are in, the instructors take the best of the assignments, fix any errors, and incorporate those into the text. Give time for people to learn all of the material, have a quiz, and move on to the next chapter.
So after the first class goes through, there exists a text book. The text can be refined as more and more sets of students go through the course. A large portion of the work is done by the students themselves, leaving the experts time to actually teach stuff.