Category: Science / Technology

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. … Read more

Story: Picking up the story in the wake of the 1986 Challenger tragedy, the author chronicles, through interviews with as many of the astronauts as possible who were flying the missions, every shuttle flight from 1989 through the end of the shuttle program in 2011. Though most of these flights are chronicled chronologically, there are special sections devoted to flights related to the Hubble Space Telescope, flights to the Russian space station Mir, and the flights that built Mir’s successor, the International Space Station.

Review: In this reviewer’s lifetime, we’ve gone from it not being an unreasonable prospect to have memorized the name of every astronaut who flew in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs (Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz included) to there having been more astronauts flown aboard the space shuttle than anyone could reasonably be expected to commit to memory. The shuttle flew over a hundred times, and in many cases engaged in research missions that didn’t get the public attention of a moonshot or a major first, but were of major importance in preparing for long-term human habitation in space. The sheer number of missions, and crew members, threatens to turn into indecipherable background noise. This book does a lot to fix that problem, introducing you to the astronauts who flew the missions and laying out the goals and the stakes of each mission. … Read more

Story: From the moment that Pluto fell off the itinerary of worlds to be visited by the Voyager spacecraft during that mission’s planning stages, scientists wanted to find a way back to what was then regarded as the outermost planet. Inspired by the outcome of the Voyager missions, Alan Stern takes on the task of heading up the “Pluto Underground” in the late 1980s to begin to build support for a robotic mission to Pluto, a goal that will encounter far more obstacles than he anticipates.

Review: A warts-and-all history of the mission that, after many permutations, false starts, and NASA cancellations, became known as New Horizons, this book does include the romance of discovery, but it also includes the political machinations that go into mission proposals and NASA’s competitive mission selection process. The mission doesn’t launch until around halfway through the book. What takes up the first half is startling, sobering, and maybe just a little bit unnerving. … Read more