Beginning with Rocket Dreamers, “Spaceflight” looks at the pioneering efforts such as Wu Han’s rocket chair, Congreve’s rockets, and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and how they influenced visionaries such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, and Wernher von Braun. The development of missiles such as the A4 [renamed the V-2 and sent to war], and, ultimately, Operation Overcast, which brought the German rocket program to the United States.
The Cold War Space Race had begun, with von Braun and the rocket scientists from Peenemünde settled in Huntsville, Alabama and Sergei Pavlovich in the forefront of the Soviet space efforts. This led to a race to develop more powerful, longer-range missiles and the development of X-planes, which ultimately became the first to break the sound barrier. With the space race in high gear, the first Redstone lifted off from the launch pad in 1953.

The Dawn of the Space Age chronicles the space race, beginning with Sputnik, Laika, and Explorer I. Then the increasingly-ambitious early satellites such as Sputnik 3 and Pioneer 1 sought to establish the potential future uses of space. The Soviet Luna probes reached the Moon while Pioneer V became the first spacecraft deliberately launched into interplanetary space and Mariner 2 headed toward Venus. Meanwhile, both Britain and France recognized the importance of having an independent launch capability and set about developing their own space programs.
Determined to be the first to put man into space, the Soviets developed Vostok and set about training cosmonauts while NASA established Project Mercury and selected seven astronauts.

The Race to the Moon begins with President Kennedy’s challenge and examines the Voskhod and Gemini programs, the first spacewalks, and plans for Apollo. Despite the tragedy of Apollo 1, which grounded NASA’s space program for some twenty-one months, Apollo 7 flew with a redesigned spacecraft in a mission that was a shakedown cruise for a trip to the moon and included, for the first time, a NASA broadcast of a television feed from space.
A series of setbacks and development problems in the Soviet program virtually ensured that, despite their ongoing efforts, the Soviets would not reach the Moon before the Americans. The Soyuz program had some setbacks, including the loss of a cosmonaut on re-entry, but by the end of the 1960s, the Soyuz rendezvous and docking in space finally took place while NASA continued the Apollo missions in preparation for a July 1969 landing on the moon. Apollo flights 12 through 17 continued, with the drama and successful return of Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank explosion.

After Apollo, with the moon race behind them, both the Soviets and the Americans turned to orbiting labs and space stations, including Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and Salyut. As with the earlier missions, there were both triumphs and tragedies, including the death of the crew during the re-entry of Soyuz 11.

Working in Space looks at spaceplanes, the Space Shuttle missions, Spacelab, satellite servicing, the Challenger disaster, and the Mir space station. Buran, the Soviet shuttle, pushed the Soviet space program to the limit, ultimately foundering; the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a series of Shuttle-Mir missions before Mir’s demise. The loss of Space Shuttle Columbia again brought home a reminder of the danger inherent in space exploration; a hiatus in the program ultimately delayed progress on the International Space Station and, after twenty-one more missions, the shuttles were retired.
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency, Japan, China, and Israel all conducted space missions and their space programs led to a corps of international astronauts.

Satellites and Spaceprobes examines communications, astronomy, orbiting observatories, moon probes, exploring the planets, Voyager, Galileo, comets and asteroids, the Mars exploration rover, and Cassini-Huygens all of which expanded man’s view of the solar system and propelled exploration to the boundaries of technology.

Into the Future takes a closer look at the International Space Station and the work conducted there. But what is next? Spaceplanes, large and small, are on the drawing board as China looks toward manned spaceflight and spaceprobes explore uncharted corners of the solar system. Will man return to the Moon? Travel to Mars? With commercialism may come space tourism, and technological advances may one day propel mankind into the colonization of space.

This coffee table-sized book includes a foreword by Buzz Aldrin and, filled with photographs and three-dimensional illustrations, celebrates the triumphs of the people, the science, and the hardware as it recounts the history of mankind’s first sixty years of its steps into space. It’s a must-read for any reader interested in the development of manned space programs and the exploration of the solar system.

Highly recommended. ( )

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