Story: Starting with the rationales and early studies leading up to the approval of the space shuttle program, the book then progresses through the vehicle’s lengthy development, the recruitment of the first astronaut class since the Apollo days, Frustrating setbacks, the triumphant and yet tentative first flights, and then the halcyon days of the early-to-mid ’80s when NASA began treating the shuttle as an airline that just happened to go into Earth orbit. The fateful final flight of Challenger, and the fallout from that, gives the book a bit of a downer ending.
Review: Have I been on a bit of a space shuttle bender lately? Yes. Yes I have. But each book I read on the subject has interesting things to say to shed light on the subject matter. Where I previously reviewed a coffee table book that covered a lot of the same span of time as Bold They Rise, this is a book that flips the ratio of text to illustrations heavily in favor of text. A later volume in the Outward Odyssey library covers every shuttle mission from 1988 through 2011, a 23-year span containing most of the actual flown missions in the program. You’d think that Bold They Rise, with only 25 missions to cover (one of which lasted 73 seconds), can proceed at a more leisurely pace.
But Bold They Rise also covers the inception and development of the shuttle, with a particular focus on the concessions made to the U.S. Air Force’s laundry list of capabilities the shuttle needed to fly military missions. Everything from cargo capacity to the shuttle wingspan (and thus the vulnerability to the kind of damage that doomed Columbia in 2003) was calculated with military needs in mind, capabilities that ultimately went unused. There are fascinating hints toward the end of the book about the cancelled mission STS-62A, which would have been the first polar-orbit shuttle mission and the first to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Vandenberg Space Force Base). It’s a pity that this would’ve been yet another classified mission, because the what-ifs in that scenario are worthy of their own book. (Side note to Outward Odyssey series editor Colin Burgess: always capitalize the branches of the Armed Forces. That issue really triggered my copy editor brain throughout the book.)
The development of the shuttle hardware, and how much input the astronauts had – including the newly recruited astronaut class of 1978 – is another fascinating area covered, along with the five test flights (off the back of a Boeing 747) of the shuttle Enterprise. I’ve always been fascinated by the ALT (Approach & Landing Test) flights, and there’s a nice amount of inside information here on those flights that seemed so jaw-dropping when my age was in the single digits and the space shuttle was suddenly something that wasn’t just on paper and wasn’t just hype. “The coming age of the space shuttle” always seemed a long way off; the book does a lot of legwork in explaining why. Once the shuttle is flying, however, it’s fascinating to see NASA’s early mindset regarding the shuttle – the notion that the shuttle would fly very frequently, with two missions a month in some cases, and anyone, from specialists representing commercial interests to sitting members of Congress, could train for a shuttle mission. Early in the book, it’s pointed out that the shuttle was a nearly-flawless machine – the vehicle itself never had a major failure, but the two orbiters lost were destroyed by known issues with the launch system – and one can sense that there was perhaps a bit of hubris sneaking into the program.
This isn’t necessarily a criticism, but more of a caveat: Bold They Rise draws heavily from the publicly-available NASA oral history interview series. There are interviews that were conducted specifically for the book, but there are also extensive excerpts from that interview archive (which is, of course, in the public domain and is open to such use). If you’ve read any of those interviews before – and hey, I understand that the average person probably hasn’t, which is why this more of a “just so you know” than a criticism – you may find some of it familiar. In fairness, the period covered by this book starts over fifty years ago, and in some cases these pre-existing NASA interviews are the only way to get a first-hand quote from some of the early players in the shuttle program.
Bold They Rise is fascinating, engrossing reading, a time capsule from an era of crewed spaceflight unlike anything we’re ever likely to see again.
Year: November 1, 2014
Authors: David Hitt, Heather R. Smith
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Pages: 328
