★★★★★ 4
Interesting Material For The Space Inclined
Format: Hardcover
Okay, so I should start by saying that I am not a space exploration expert or really enthusiast. I am curious though. What this means is I don't have a lot of books on space exploration, and I haven't spent large amount of time looking at that kind of information. This review is from someone who is, well as I said, curious about it.
So let's kind of start with what this book covers, very early theory kind of things, lie Greek BCE space models all the way through possible future exploration and challenges with future development. It's very dry, very factual. It reminds me of kind of a textbook approach where it takes ideas like thee Space Lab, spy satellites (Corona Reconnaissance), and launch vehicles from Asia and just lays out what happened and key facts about the topic. These are not stories persay. They're not meant to grip someone not already interested and while I am sure someone deep into the topic might feel perfectly adequate to some, I wish I had more incentive to read it from start to end. Instead I largely jumped around looking at specific topics like the the First Flight, Columbia, which I had a basic foundation of information for already. This made it an easy read. In that same section, there is a topic called out about New Astronauts where women, diversity and non-military personnel like engineers and scientists became astronauts. For sections like these I wish there was... well more.
So it took me a really long time to go through the book because it consist of several topics that didn't draw me in and several that did but didn't provide as much information as I wanted. The book promises the history of the space exploration, from ancient time and to the future, and largely it delivers on the promise, in brief snippets, and maybe it the ambition of that massive amount of time that it left me feeling wanting about topics I already had interest in, like Mining the Solar system.
Think of this is a way to touch on nearly every topic, an tiny introduction to each one because very few topics have more than one or two pages covering it which means if you really want to know who is wants to go mine those 2 to 3k mineral rich asteroids, for what, and what the challenges are.. you'll need to find another book.
Finally, I'll touch on the pictures. Yes, you can find a lot of these online, probably even bigger ones, but have them all in one place. There are so many of them that you really could just thumb through the pages and see iconic as well as pleasantly surprising ones, and each one has a caption that gives some key details, like one that is the Boeing made shuttle main engine you can find at, well one of the museums of course! There was also a basic schematic for one of the engines which I was not expecting, and the same thing for a voyager probe.
It won't bee something I will ever browse again for casual reading, but for a space lover, this might be just thing they want to start with.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2019
