The fascinating story of how NASA sent humans to explore outer space, told through a treasure trove of historical documents–publishing in celebration of NASA’s 60th anniversary and with a foreword by Bill Nye“An extremely useful and thought provoking documentary journey through the maze of space history. There is no wiser or more experienced navigator through the twists and turns and ups and … turns and ups and downs than John Logsdon.” -James Hansen, New York Times bestselling author of First Man, now a feature film starring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy
Among all the technological accomplishments of the last century, none has captured our imagination more deeply than the movement of humans into outer space. From Sputnik to SpaceX, the story of that journey–including the inside history of our voyages to the moon depicted in First Man–is told as never before in The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration.
Renowned space historian John Logsdon traces the greatest moments in human spaceflight by weaving together essential, fascinating documents from NASA’s history with his expert narrative guidance. Beginning with rocket genius Wernher von Braun’s vision for voyaging to Mars, and closing with Elon Musk’s contemporary plan to get there, this volume traces major events like the founding of NASA, the first American astronauts in space, the Apollo moon landings, the Challenger disaster, the daring Hubble Telescope repairs, and more. In these pages, we such gems as Eisenhower’s reactions to Sputnik, the original NASA astronaut application, John Glenn’s reflections on zero gravity, Kennedy’s directives to go to the moon, discussions on what Neil Armstrong’s first famous first words should be, firsthands accounts of spaceflight, and so much more.
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This is an excellent book on the whole, but I do have a few issues with it, starting with the title. You’d think a “Book of Outer Space Exploration” would include missions like the Mariners, Vikings, and Voyagers, but the subtitle is more correct: this is a curated selection of documents covering the history of human spaceflight at NASA. As such, it’s magisterial.
After a prologue setting the background, it begins in 1955 with recommendations by the National Security Council (remember, NASA didn’t exist yet) on how the US should start a space program. Next is Pravda’s announcement of Sputnik I followed by US documents covering the Eisenhower administration’s reaction to the launch. This leads to a document recommending the establishment of a government space agency built on the existing National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) and shortly leads to the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. There ensue memoranda and papers discussing the initial challenges NASA faces. Each of these is preceded by text from Logsdon establishing the context for each document.
That’s Chapter 1. Chapter 2 begins the focus on crewed space flight with the Mercury program. One of my quibbles occurs here: Logsdon claims that Glenn’s flight was originally planned for seven orbits but was cut to three due to concerns about what ended up being a spurious signal indicating the landing bag had been deployed. There is a statement on the flight audio about “at least seven orbits”, but that was commenting on the stability of the trajectory. There were never any plans to go beyond three orbits, and in fact the only mission alternatives were one or two orbits.
Chapter 2 concludes with fairly brief coverage of Project Gemini, which tested the various space techniques and technologies that Apollo would need, like rendezvous and docking, long-duration space missions, and space walks.
Chapter 3 is the core of the book, focusing on Project Apollo. This initially tracks back to 1961 and the efforts the Kennedy Administration made to decide where to go with the space program, culminating in President Kennedy’s announcement before a joint session of Congress that “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Next is the question of how to do it, with one of the key documents being John Houbolt’s letter to NASA Associate Administrator Robert Seamans making the case for lunar-orbit rendezvous, at the time an approach not even being seriously considered. Other entries show Wernher von Braun and other key parties coming around to the approach.
Other documents cover the issues NASA had with North American Aviation’s development of the Command and Service Module and continue, tragically, with the report on the Apollo 1 fire. Then there’s the decision – pushed by the Lunar Module not yet being ready – to send Apollo 8 to the Moon.
There’s an amusing bit of politics when the Nixon Administration quashes the proposal to dub the Apollo 11 mission “The John F. Kennedy.”
More seriously, there’s the speech William Safire wrote for Nixon in case the astronauts couldn’t make it home, and then debriefs on how the mission went. The most interesting debrief, though, might be James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, writing about that “successful failure.” You can see where the screenplay writers of the movie got a lot of their ideas.
Finally, there’s the decision to cancel Apollos 15 and 19, followed by an unsuccessful push to end the program with the scientific success of Apollo 15.
The final chapter is aptly titled “Steps Toward an Uncertain Future”. Lacking the clear Man-Moon-Decade mandate set by Kennedy, NASA had no clear path forward. With unlimited funding, NASA would have liked to have continued building Saturn Vs, created a permanent space station, and started a push to land humans on Mars by the end of the century. Of course, funding was limited, and Nixon had no interest in continuing Kennedy’s Apollo program. So NASA ended up doing a space shuttle instead, and on the cheap, at that, giving up on the long-term savings of full reusability due to the short-term cost of developing it in the first place.
Then a decade later Reagan announces the goal of developing a space station after all. This goes from a US-only effort to a partnership with the Russians – in part to get Russian engineers to do something better with their time than building missiles for Iran or North Korea.
And there are excerpts here from the Rogers Commission report on the destruction of Challenger, and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report on that tragic failure. And here’s where I take seriously exception. I was somewhat nonplussed that the selected excerpt from the Rogers report focuses solely on the technical issue of the O-ring failure. Then before the CAIB report Logsdon states:
Unlike the situation following the Challenger accident, when the Rogers Commission report limited itself to the physical causes of the accident and the steps needed to return the shuttle to flight, the CAIB delved into the underlying factors within NASA that had created the context leading to the accident. In its report, the board listed not only the physical cause of the accident but also its organizational roots.
My jaw dropped at this, possibly literally. The Rogers Commission report has four chapters covering the underlying factors, most notably the one with the sentence beginning “The decision to launch the Challenger was flawed.” Then there’s the chapter that begins with:
The Commission was surprised to realize after many hours of’ testimony that NASA’s safety staff was never mentioned. No witness related the approval or disapproval of the reliability engineers, and none expressed the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the quality assurance staff. No one thought to invite a safety representative or a reliability and quality assurance engineer to the January 27, 1986, teleconference between Marshall and Thiokol. Similarly, there was no representative of safety on the Mission Management Team that made key decisions during the countdown on January 28, 1986. The Commission is concerned about the symptoms that it sees.
It’s an egregious omission not to include any of this material in this book and an even more appalling act to claim that this material doesn’t exist. Reading this portion of the Rogers report made me physically ill – reading the denial here made me want to throw the book across the room. But I managed to restrain myself and keep reading.
The book concludes with an epilogue that incorporates one document that points to the future, a piece by Elon Musk entitled “Making Humans a Multi-Planet Species”. Perhaps in another fifty years there will be a second volume to this work that will cover humanity’s efforts to become a truly spacefaring civilization.
So there are a few flaws in this book – one of them major – but on the whole this is an invaluable reference work that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the history of space exploration.