Books on space that soar above the rest.
BY WILLIAM BURROWS Saturday, December 30, 2006 12:01 a.m.
This meticulously researched, lavishly illustrated three-volume boxed set is a glorious upgrading of the version of the "A Man on the Moon" published in 1994 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Tom Hanks--unabashed space junkie and the executive producer of the 1998 HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" based on the book--wrote the introduction for this edition. "A Man on the Moon" captures the sweep of the successive Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. But what sets this history apart from others is that it completes the story by following the astronauts long after they accomplished their monumental feats. Frank Borman, for example, decided to work for Eastern Airlines and got caught in a cat's cradle of politics for which even life coping with NASA's bureaucracy had failed to prepare him.
With the advent of glasnost in the 1980s, the Soviet space archives were opened to outsiders, revealing the full extent of Moscow's effort to compete with the U.S.--and providing NASA historian Asif Siddiqi with the material for this clearly written, exhaustively detailed historical narrative. As "Challenge to Apollo" makes clear, the Soviets' program was undermined by ferocious infighting between Sergei Korolev, the storied chief designer of the Soviet space effort, and his archrival, Valentin Glushko. But even if those two had reached their own glasnost, the Soviet effort was doomed to fall behind: The political and economic system under which Korolev and Glushko operated was grossly unequal to the task of beating its capitalist competitors to another world.
"Lost Moon" is really two stories. One is familiar: that of the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, the only one of the seven moon-landing missions that did not make it to luna firma. An oxygen tank exploded, forcing the spacecraft to abort the landing, swing around the far side of the moon and limp home. It's a nail-biting saga as told by one of the astronauts who was there, Jim Lovell. But he and science writer Jeffrey Kluger also excel in describing the less well-known--but in some ways just as gripping--tale of the usually anonymous cadre of ground controllers, mission directors, engineers and others who worked to save Apollo 13--and without whom there would be no space missions.
Thomas D. Jones, or "TJ" to his friends and colleagues, has written a thoughtful and engrossing memoir about training to be an astronaut and then flying on four shuttle missions. He displays a joy in his experience that is deeply spiritual, but he is also pragmatic. "Never have I felt so insignificant, part of a scene so obviously set by God," Jones says of looking at the home planet while floating near the International Space Station 200 miles aloft. Yet he also describes in practical terms the wary camaraderie of working with former Cold War rivals from Russia, the challenge of spending 52 days in orbit and the frustration of having a space walk scrubbed for the most mundane of reasons: The handle on the hatch door stuck.
Philip Plait is a California astronomer who evidently became so exasperated with the contemporary warping of science by ideology or just plain ignorance that he wrote "Bad Astronomy" as an antidote. This primer on basic astronomy explains, among much else, why the moon sometimes hits your eye like a big pizza pie (it happens when the moon reaches the perigee of its elliptical orbit and is closest to us). But Plait's astronomical discussions also take on creationism. My favorite part of the book: when he goes after the crowd that claims the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. Years ago, Buzz Aldrin showed one way to deal with this bizarre belief when someone shoved a Bible at him and demanded that he swear he actually landed on the moon; Aldrin decked the guy. Plait achieves the equivalent with words.
Mr. Burrows is the author of "This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age." His most recent book is "The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth" (Tor/Forge, 2006). Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.