North Alabama II: Space, the Final Frontier

I visited the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center in my childhood, but my memories of it are hazy.  I found it much changed; although the rockets are still there, of course, what little I remember is gone and a lot of new stuff has taken its place.  The museum is divided into three areas:  the Saturn complex (seen above) houses a Saturn V  hanging from the ceiling, alongside which run the majority of the space program exhibits; outside is a rocket park, which shows off the entire family of Redstones, Junos, and Saturns, along with pieces of military equipment that rely on missiles or avionics; and on the other side of the park is the 'main' museum, which includes exhibits on invention, avionics, and military hardware, along with a rock climbing wall.  Most of the exhibits are of the electronic interactive kind, in which visitors watch videos, play games, and create a general din of noise.  There are reminders that this is a space museum, however, in the impossible-to-miss mock-up of the international space station. This is used for the "space camp", which encourages children to become astronauts and has them swim in underwater tanks, that sort of thing.  

Now, what shuttle is that? It's not a shuttle, really: it's called Pathfinder, and is a wood and steel mock-up of a shuttle. Huntsville was unable to get one of the retired shuttles after the program was terminated,  possibly because it already has the remains of Skylab, an Apollo command module,  and the rockers.  Pathfinder passes casual inspection, however -- I only looked into it because I knew full well Huntsville hadn't gotten one of the shuttles.

This is part of the International Space Station replica, parts of which are open for touring. The other parts are reserved for space camp folk, and indeed a few kiddies were about.The walk-through demonstrated how every bit of space is used: there are storage lockers built into the "ceiling", for instance, and there are cardinal labels ("Overhead", "Deck", "Port", and "Starboard") painted to keep people oriented.  Our tour guide also demonstrated the toilet, although he only ran the vacuum. Zippers were thankfully not involved.  

When I visited back in the 1990s, I'm fairly sure the booster stood upright, sans shuttle. This new arrangement allows visitors to stand underneath and ponder how efficiently they would be squished if it were to fall. 

From left to right: the Saturn-I, the Jupiter, the Juno, the Mercury-Redstone, and the Jupiter-C. One of those was only used for the nuclear program, I believe, and the Redstones are most famous for blowing up repeatedly when the United States tried to launch their own probe after Sputnik.

Much larger is the Saturn IB,  built while the Saturn V was still being hammered out. The IB was part of Apollo 7, which saw the command/service module tested in earth orbit. 

This, however, is the titan that got men to mars. Huntsville has two Saturn Vs: the upright one outside, which is a local landmark, and the one above. It's flanked on either side by exhibits that detail the evolution of the space program, with particular interested on the five F1 engines that the Saturn relied on. 

Saturn V's "brain", the instrument panel. 

This trailer was used to quarantine astronauts upon their return to Earth, and strangely enough turned up in 2007.  The rocket center used to have another quarantine exhibit, one with a couch. The interior of the trailer has four bunkbeds on the left, and a table with chairs on the right. I asked several employees about the original exhibit, but they were all younger than me and kept pointing me towards the trailer.  (I commented to my friend as we were in line that the people selling tickets probably hadn't been born the last time I was here.)

An Apollo command module from Apollo 16. It's hard to believe three people were in that little capsule, and together they would have fallen into the ocean and bobbled together like a cork awaiting recapture. 

One of the few things that hasn't changed since my visit in the 1990s is this Blackbird, a CIA project that helped create Groom Lake/Area 51's reputation. The museum has two "Avengers", which are Humvees with missile launchers. 

We stayed here until they closed the place down, then drove back to Decatur.   What a sight to drive home to! 

Mars

 Mars
© 1992 Ben Bova
560 pages

Mankind has finally arrived on Mars, via a joint venture between the United States, Russia, Europe, and Japan. An expedition slated to last several months on the planet itself plans to explore part of the Valley of the Mariners as well as a volcano. While each member of the international expedition has his or own private ambitions to realize on the planet --   honoring Yuri Gagarin, or living up to a celebrity-scientist-father –  at least a couple of members are seriously hoping to find signs of life, living or extinct.   Although the mission is  carefully planned and equipped with redundancies, the crew still trip over one another’s personalities, and must fight against technological failures, the easy hostility of the Red Planet, and (worst of all) politicians back home.  Ben Mova’s Mars  is a tale of scientific enterprise and adventure, slightly dated in parts but timeless in its descriptions of Mars' eerie beauty.

I'd never heard of this author until the library displayed a few of his books,  and his lead character here -- a half Navajo  geologist who is fascinated by the similarities between Mars and northern New Mexico's landscapes --  caught my eye.   The story has two parts: as the geologist and his colleagues settle into life on Mars and begin their research in earnest, overcoming obstacles like dust storms and each other,  Bova occasionally flashes back to the months that led up to the expedition. (It's very similar in structure to Stephen Baxter's Voyage, another "go" for Mars story.)  There are other elements, too: the lead character's sort-of girlfriend is a news reporter eager to use her connection to him to scoop everyone else, and the expedition as a whole is at the mercy of the vice president, a blonde-haired bully who is planning a presidential run and is paranoid that everyone is out to get her.  Bova is at his strongest when taking readers through the scientific puzzles and descriptions of the Martian landscape, evoking the astronauts' wonder.  I found the frequent description of the Navajo as an "Injun" by the international expedition a little odd. While American media is pervasive, including westerns which are oddly popular in eastern Europe,  would Russians and Japanese scientists really  regard him as some uber-foreign creature?   Of course, the main character does promote cariacturization of himself, deliberately using phrases like "White man speaks with forked tongue" when his commanding officer promises something and then has to contradict it.

Bova has a series of SF books about the future of human spaceflight, and I look forward to exploring him more.  He ends this book with a terrific hook.....the possible discovery of life beyond Earth.

Related:
Voyage, Stephen Baxter
The Martian, Andy Weir

Week of Enchantment: Through Piney Mountains Cold

On Tuesday morning, I bid a reluctant farewell to Roswell and hit the road west. A half-hour of enormous plains gave way to the hills of the Hondo Valley.

The Hondo valley's rocky mounts gave way to much larger hills covered in pine trees, reminding me much of northern Alabama and Tennessee.

I reached Ruidoso much more quickly than I anticipated, around nine am -- much too early for a free wine tasting I'd arranged at a local winery. Alas.  I was also too early for the museum of the Old West,  but the horse sculptures outside were still available for admiration. 

I continued to climb steadily but not dramatically through the Sierro Blanco mountains and the Lincoln National Forest. A sign declared me to be 8,000 feet above sea level at Apache Summit. 

I made tracks for Alamagordo. Within the town itself was the Space Museum,  which is parked landmark-like upon a hill. The glass cube and rocket  next to it made for easy navigation, though getting back to the highway required instructions from an Allsups clerk. 

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be awed.

MERCURY!

Moon rock collected by Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist to walk on the moon.

I spent most of my time outside the museum admiring the rockets and other equipment. 

...beep...beep....beep...

The space museum displays covered not only the Mercury to Apollo programs, but the shuttle and Skylab as well. It featured sundry items: Russian space suits, the actual food tins carried in the Gemini and Apollo missions, and a plate that simulated the ground during rocket thrusts.  The plate had different strengths for Atlas and Saturns, as well as for whatever launched the shuttle and the Russians. The most intense one I tried was the Saturn, of course. 

Having read so many astronaut memoirs, I mostly appreciated the museum for the Mercury capsule and other aviation equipment, as well as the rocket plate. 

And now, on to White Sands! 

Deke!

Deke! U.S. Manned Space Flight from Mercury to the Shuttle
© 1994 Deke Slayton and Michael Cassutt
352 pages

Don Slayton knew he wanted to fly as a kid, but he never imagined going as high as the moon  His story is singular; chosen as one of America's first astronauts, he was grounded for medical reasons shortly into the Mercury-Gemini programs. Remaining at NASA in hopes of one day restoring his active-duty status, he was charged first with being head of the Astronaut Office, and later still director of Flight Crew Operations. His memoir of the Apollo program thus covers far more ground than one-flight wonders like Scott Carpenter or John Glenn*;  it also provides extensive information about the technical planning of the Apollo missions, Skylab, and the shuttle program.

 Just as the lunar missions were concluding, Slayton's own mission to return to active service had a happy result: he flew on the last Saturn rocket in the Apollo-Soyuz project. There, he fulfilled a hopeful wish expressed to Alexei Leonov many years prior, that one day they might share a toast in space.  (The material in the "Vodka" bottles was just soup, but it's the thought that counts.) Slayton left NASA as the space shuttle became its focus,  in part exhausted after now decades of a grueling workload, and in part because Reagan's new NASA chief was a "horse's ass".  (Slayton helped inaugurate the shuttle, being head of the Approach and Landing Tests division during its development.)   Slayton wasn't grounded after NASA: he took up a hobby of racing planes, and became a leading administrator in a private space venture, developing rockets for commercial liftng. Slayton fell prey to cancer before the book's publication, but worked on it with his co-author for several years prior to his death.  Alan Shephard's 'co-authored' book with Slayton, Moon Shot, was also published just after Slayton's death, and I suspect it drew on some of the same interviews. The stories Slayton tells about his time in Russia are identical in both books, right down to the astronauts' discovery that their rooms were bugged, and their mischievious decision to put Russian ears to good advaantage. (They would comment on how sad it was they lacked something, like a pool table, only to have one arrive days later..)

Slayton's narration is professional with a hint of irreverence, like the time he hung out ofa helicopter by a rope to collect a goat he'd shot from the air. Tthe men who answered to Slayton's strigent safety procedures at the Cape would never believe his behavior on his own time.   He goes into enormous detail on matters like how he created the mission schedule, but at moments of high emotion he isn't communicative. He often speaks of his close friendship with fellow Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, but when Grissom perishes in a fire (along with Ed White and Roger Chaffey), he can only terseley say that it was the worst day ever.  Cassutt or Slayton supplement the text with the recollections of Slayton's family or other astronauts, including his son Kent.  These add a human touch and some humor of their own. (Once, Slayton and his son were enjoying a silent game of catch. After being admonished by his wife to talk to his son and bestow some fatherly advice, Slayton pondered and then informed his son to always take a nap and use the head when he had the opportunity. Kent recalls it as one of the funniest moments of his childhood.)  Overall, the memoir delivers a big picture view of the early decades of NASA, from a man who was there at the very beginning.

The Original Capcom

Related:

• Moon Shot, Alan Shephard and Deke Slayton (forward by Neil Armstrong)
• A Man on the Moon, Neil Chaikan. Hands down the best Apollo history. 

* Sure, Glenn flew twice, but he wasn't exactly an astronaut the second time.

The Ordinary Spaceman

The Ordinary Spaceman: From Boyhood Dreams to Astronaut
© 2015 Clayton Anderson
330 pages

Clay Anderson knew when he was nine years old that he wanted to grow up to be an astronaut.. He knew it when he witnessed the crew of Apollo 8 circling the Moon on Christmas Eve.  His passion for the black took him to NASA first as an intern, and then as employee, where he worked for well over a decade before the last of his fifteen applications to the astronaut program proper landed him a spot in the class of 1996.   The Ordinary Astronaut is a memoir of his years at NASA and in the shuttle program, one filled with interesting details but not much in the way of long-term perspective.

Ordinary Spaceman is primarily a work of human interest, since Anderson almost never refers to his scientific work, or comments on the space program as a whole.   Unlike Tom Jones' Sky Walking, which combined Jones' memoirs with a narrative history of NASA during the eighties and nineties to provide background information,  there's no broad review of the organization. We get instead workplace stories which happen to be set in space shuttles, the space station, and Russia's "Star City".  Since this is NASA the work stories can be extraordinary; for instance, early on he was asked by Rick Husband to be a family escort during Husband’s  mission aboard Columbia; ordinarily, this involves driving the family around during launches and landings, getting them punch, and offering reassuring answers to concerned questions.  If the name Husband rings a bell, it should – he commanded the Columbia when it broke apart in orbit, and Anderson became not just a valet, but the immediate focus of the family’s sorrow and despair, helping them to shoulder their emotional burden – a shared one, for he and Husband had trained together.  More cheerful is his account of the extensive time spent with Russian astronauts in Star City.  Anderson's class was required to have a rudimentary grasp on the Russian language, and part of his basic training took place in Russia where he learned their systems as well.   Still more fascinating is his recollection of time spent in NASA's underwater  habitat,  which offered its own difficulty and delight --  the photo of Anderson staring out into the water at a close-range school of fish makes obvious the utter joy it brought to him.

The Ordinary Spaceman is an odd book.  It lives up to its title in that  Anderson seems like a guy off the street, a Nebraska farmer in space. He didn't enter NASA as a hotshot pilot, but as a civilian intern. He met his wife in the cafeteria line and uses Wikipedia as his go-to reference. (The first time he did this, to supplement his memory while remniscing over Saturday morning cartoons, I thought it was funny. The next five times, when he was referring to actual NASA history, not so much.) It abounds in stories about the mundane details of working for NASA, the inns and outs, without drifting into complaining.   (I do mean ins and outs: he goes into great detail on how to use a space-toilet, records at length his body's reaction to returning to Earth by expelling fluid from every possible orifice, chronicles his attempt to self-administer an enema, and proudly counts himself as the only man to poop in four space vessels -- two shuttles, Soyuz, and the ISS.) Towards the end the organization gets odd, very back and forth, frequently chatty -- but ultimately, Anderson is a nice guy who sustains the reader's sympathy and affection.  His career in NASA, by his own account, was undermined by his own weaknesses,  like a short temper. But he's not proud of failing at times, and does his best to make amends. In that, he really is an ordinary guy, doing his best, and picking up the pieces when he goes  off the rails. The Ordinary Spaceman is more useful as an account of a man's living the dream at NASA than about NASA or shuttle spaceflight in general, but a boyhood fantasy turned reality certainly has its appeal.

Anderson's space selfie

Related:

• Sky Walking, Tom Jones.  Not quite as fun, but more substantive  in regards to appreciating the history of the shuttle program and the creation of the ISS.
• Two Sides of the Moon, Alexei Leonov and Dave Scott. Joint Apollo-Soyuz history of the space race, with a lot of content on the Russian space program and Star City. 

Men from Earth

Men from Earth
© 1989 Buzz Aldrin and Malcom McConnell
314 pages

Forty-seven years ago, men from Earth first stepped foot on the moon. There, they left medals commemorating the men of Apollo and Soyuz who perished in this quest for fire in the sky, and a plaque that declared their intentions: "We came in peace for all mankind."    Buzz Aldrin was one of the first men to step foot upon the grey dust of the lunar surface, and in this account -- published in 1989,  twenty years after the triumph of Apollo -- he provides a history of the early space race, a memoir of his own time in the Gemini and Apollo programs, and a final thought about the future.

While there is no shortage of astronaut memoirs, Aldrin's intrigued me at the start because I knew from other books that he  helped create the orbital rendezvous procedures that were practiced in Gemini and essential to pulling Apollo off.  The astronauts weren't just fighter jocks: advanced degrees were required of any astronaut candidate. While the account of the first-ever lunar landing is interesting in its own right, Aldrin attempts to record the whole of the space race. Not only does he devote early chapters to the beginning of German, American, and Russian rocketry, but throughout the book he follows developments on the Soviet side as well.  He draws from other books here,  then-recent scholarship. While sometimes the supporting authors are forced to speculate, given Soviet secrecy, the look across the iron curtain is most welcome. Both programs were beset with similar problems -- not only technical, but political, as program coordinators were being pushed for results by their respective governments for moral and propaganda purposes.

Aldrin's writing is detailed, but shouldn't scare off readers who are wary of too much technical detail. The descriptive writing is sound -- not poetic, but it's hard to compete with A Man on the Moon on that note.  One  sight is especially well conveyed, the eerie and abrupt transition of light when Armstrong and Aldrin left the shadow cast by their lander. According to Aldrin, the effect was total: if he stepped out of the shadow and cast his arm behind him back into it, it almost seem to disappear into another realm.  There was no transition between dark and light; when they left the shadow, the blinding drama was though they'd transported from the depths of Carlsbad Caverns into the middle of the Sahara. Also of note here is a final chapter, covering '1969-2009'.    Writing in the eighties, when the shuttle fleet was active and routine, with the International Space Station still in the future, Aldrin seemed  disappointed but optimistic. He is wary of the Soviets, who continue to support manned spaceflight. While they would collapse within a year or so of this book being published, these days NASA astronauts still hitch rides with Soyuz up to the ISS, so Aldrin's concern is not that far off.   Aldrin remains a space booster, recently writing a book encouraging a manned mission to Mars.

Men from Earth is a shorter history of the space race than A Man on the Moon,  but if you're looking for a history of Apollo as whole it might not satisfy,. He ends with Apollo 11, and some of the most interesting lunar missions -- scientific endeavors with go-karts! -- were thus not mentioned. Still, for a recap of Mercury and Gemini it's quite good, and especially so when the coverage of the Russians is taken into account.

Related:

• Two Sides of the Moon, Alexei Leonov and David Scott. Joint memoir between an astronaut and a cosmonaut. 
• A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikan. The definitive Apollo history. 

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey
© 1986 Arthur C. Clark, Stanley Kubrick
316 pgs

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, mankind makes an extraordinary discovery: unmistakable evidence of life outside the environs of Earth. An object on the moon makes plain the fact that three million years ago, extraordinary and intelligent creatures were present…but who they were, and what their interest or relationship was with Earth, is a mystery with clues as far removed as Saturn. 2001: A Space Odyssey, is both the story of a physical journey through the Solar System in search of answers, and a fatalistic view of mankind’s evolution.

Surely there is a word for completely misinterpreting the plot of a story based on pop culture references. It would apply to my experience with 2001, which was far as I was concerned was wholly about an astronaut named Dave’s struggle with the sentient artificial intelligence running his ship – and running amok. As it turns out, HAL-9000 is dispatched in one chapter here, and the story is mostly about mankind’s progress toward…oblivion? Clark combines technological optimism and Cold War fatalism in such a way that the ending really threw me. Admittedly, I was poised to be thrown: a sequence in which the main character is taken on a journey through the Cosmos by a greater lifeform reminded me of similar voyages in Contact and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Suffice it to say, in 2001 the main character does not return to Earth with a transcendental view of the universe to share with his fellows for their betterment. It’s more like the ending to Beneath the Planet of the Apes; though considering that the book begins with ape-men learning to use tools to smack around their neighbors, I suppose it’s appropriate.

2001 is dated in its optimistic predictions about our establishing sizable, stable outposts on Mars and the Moon. There’s not a lot of science actually mentioned, though, so once one ignores the date, anachronisms almost cease. (Okay, so the Soviet Union isn't still around, and 'tablets' are around a few years before their time...) As an adventure set in space, it’s great fun, I knew what was coming with HAL, and even so the so realization by Dave that his computer was listening and moving against him succeeded. While there’s not a lot of hard science, 2001 does touch on a few heady topics, like the volatility of intelligence; considering the difficulties in managing human-made AI, the lead characters how we can reasonably expect to communicate with completely foreign intelligences. As unexpectedly grim as the ending was, I do appreciate Clarke for hinting that superior intelligence does not necessarily bring with it a “more evolved sensibility”. Naturally, I share Carl Sagan’s hope that if there are other intelligences out there, those with powers greater than ours, that their survival past ‘technological adolescence’ indicates they have their CRUSH KILL DESTROY instincts in check. That doesn't mean they would recognize us as beings whose life merits respect, though. We might be as incidental to them as flies upon an interstellar windshield.

We Could Not Fail

We Could Not Fail: The First African-Americans in the Space Program
© 2015 Richard Paul, Steven Moss
312 pages

Between the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, and both political and racial riots throughout the United States, 1968 was a tumultuous year for the American nation. It closed, however, with the glimpse of a hopeful future -- a glimpse of the heavens, as three astronauts circled the Moon in low orbit in December. We Could Not Fail is a history of NASA's connection with the Civil Rights movement, revealing how its vision of the future threw light upon the dark legacy of the Jim Crow past.  The history unfolds in a series of miniature biographies,  though only one actually approaches the astronaut program.  Most of the people involved worked as NASA technicians or within industries that supplied it.   NASA shared its history with the Civil Rights program,  and not simply because the movement's most restive years coincided with the push for space, during the administrations of men who claimed (in JFK's case) or devoutly cared about fulfilling the promise of the American dream. The space ideal of NASA didn't just help inspire Americans, southerners included, to push beyond old limits -- it also  provided the means for uplifting the south. Johnson,  a Texan himself, believed that the greatest hindrance to the south growing beyond segregation was its economic despondency.  Create regional prosperity in the south, he figured, and inequality and the institutions that supported it would evaporate away.  Because NASA was the most highly visible arm of the Federal government during this years, it had a special responsibility to effect more equal hiring practices.  Despite the pressure of the Kennedy brothers and Johnson, NASA struggled, more for want of material than ideas. Most engineers and support staff were recruited from the south itself, and segregated communities ceded ground only grudgingly to what NASA administrator James Webb wanted to do. One struggle, for instance, was reforming local housing politics, as discrimination kept black employees from relocating near NASA's base of operations. Similarly, while there were black technical schools, NASA overlooked them: fortunately, men like Julius Montgomery,  a  black engineer, were advocating for the integration of places like Florida Tech.   We Could Not Fail documents well the struggle of LBJ and Webb  to make NASA's promise a reality, through the lives of the would-be astronauts, activists, engineers, teachers, and other ordinary heroes who endured oppression with moral dignity, persevering until their value both as human beings and pioneers in a new age of exploration were recognized.

Voyage

Voyage: A Novel of What Might have Been
© 1996 Stephen Baxter
511 pages

            On November 22^nd, 1963, John F. Kennedy narrowly escaped assassination while touring Dallas, Texas. A gunman’s assault left his wife Jacqueline dead and the president hospitalized, but he lived to see the fulfillment of the mission he set before the American nation in early 1961:  land a man on the moon and return him safely home before decade’s end. During the famed ‘phone call to the moon’,  JFK issued another challenge:  Mars.  Voyage is an alternate history of the American space program in novel form,  the story of man’s successful journey to Mars.   Voyage impresses, not only with its technical detail, but that combined with its even-handed reflection on what a Mars program might have meant in the 1980s.  

Baxter writes Voyage in two paths that rendezvous in the 1980s: after opening with the Mars-bound flight’s liftoff and following its initial  burns and maneuvers to go for Mars orbit,  he switches to 1969, to the beginning of another more arduous journey, when America steeled itself   for a greater challenge and tried to find a way to make it happen.  Going to Mars isn’t easier than the moon shot, and even the momentum gained by  triumph at the Sea of Tranquility evaporates away as the program is stymied by physical requirements. The crew that goes to Mars will need to be self-supporting for over a year, not just a week;  and though they will be far from rescue they can’t afford to take on too many supplies or incorporate too many  backup systems.  When escaping Earth’s gravity well, every gram counts. Politics and economics complicate matters further;  as the Vietnam War escalates and recession worsens, the government is anxious to cut costs. The war and other government programs might cost far more, but NASA’s expenses are as obvious as their rockets climbing into the sky.  The program carries on through sheer grit, urged on lightly by the aging JFK and pushed by the aerospace industry, wholly dependent on the manned program.

And therein lies the rub, for though Baxter makes clear in his afterword that he regrets the lack of an historic push for Mars,  the timeline of Voyage doesn’t shy away from the fact that such an effort would have been a mixed bag.  The will required to make Mars saps energy for everything else; not only are many of the later Apollo landings scrapped, but the exploration of the solar system by probe is missed altogether, and the Space Shuttle is shelved.  The aerospace industry, rather than diversifying to meet the different challenges needed for advanced probes, the shuttles, and the like, is fixated on one line of technology. It’s not a recipe for a healthy industry, either in business  terms or for personnel:  at least one character is hospitalized as a result of the stress.  The turmoil caused by the constant overwork, in addition to all of the challenges of the seventies, makes the weary United States in Voyage a tired, ailed nation indeed;  will those footsteps on Mars be worth it?

In addition to the story of the United States as a nation, meeting this challenge and coping with the consequences good and bad,   Voyage is a personal encounter, one driven by the ambitions and stubbornness of the astronauts who will make the journey. While some characters are historical (Chuck Jones,  who here stays in NASA instead of joining Sealab), most are invented, including  Joe Muldoon, who relegates poor Buzz Aldrin to nonexistence. The crew that lands is entirely fictional, including the book’s chief viewpoint character Natalie York, who is NASA’s first science-astronaut who sees space, since Harrison Schmitt never flew. Natalie is also the first female, and she's somewhat sensitive about the fact that she's breaking into a career dominated by fighter jocks. Part of her own voyage is learning to deal with NASA on its own terms:  the space program isn't going to stick an unspaced rookie onto the Mars team without her finding a way to be indispensable.         

Space junkies will be most pleased with Voyage; I've read at least a half-dozen astronaut memoirs, and the technical detail incorporated into the storyline is on part with the astronauts' actual accounts. This is definitely on the 'hard' side of science fiction, based on real  science, including the NERVA rocket. There are many references to the history-that-might-have-been, from  the head of the Mars program quoting Deke Slayton ("The first men to step on Mars are sitting in this room") to another hanging a lemon in the window of the Mars lander to indicate that he isn't pleased,  echoing Gus Grissom and Apollo.  The modules produced for the Mars programs take familiar names, names like Endeavor and Discovery --  names that the Shuttle fleet used.  Like the Apollo program, there are tragedies, some grievous; but while the Challenger of our timeline proved a source of sorrow,  Baxter's Challenger marks humanity's greatest accomplishment. It -- the ship and the book --  are a fitting salute to the men and women of the space program, and a solid read.

Related:
The Martian, Andy Weir.   Voyage wouldn't have caught my eye were it not for reading this a week or so ago, the story of a man stranded on Mars in the near future.
Contact, Carl Sagan. Natalie York may have been a redhead, but I imagined and heard her as Ellie Arroway.
Mission to Mars, Buzz Aldrin.

The Martian

The Martian
© 2013 Andy Weir
369 pages

I was elated!  This was the best plan ever! Not only was I clearing out the hydrogen, I was making more water! 

Everything went great right up to the explosion. 

p. 43

Mark Watney never thought his Mars mission would make history. He was the eighteenth man on the planet, a member of the third  mission there; who remembers the third man to set foot on the Moon, let alone the fifteenth?  But when a dust storm threw a communications setup into his chest and his colleagues were forced to quit the planet before recovering his body lest their ride home be destroyed,  Mark woke up to find himself the only man on the planet – the only man around, in fact, for millions of miles. Robinson Crusoe, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Fortunately for Mark, not only did the aborted mission leave him with his five crewmates’ supplies, but he’s a botanist and a mechanical engineer.  Mark’s own mind – his scientific experience and creativity,, along with a   if-this-doesn’t-work-I’m-dead-anyway intrepidity -- is his best resource, though. Not even rationing his rations will see him through the four years that will pass before the next Ares mission lands. And so Mark tries to find a way to survive, to turn his limited equipment and Mars' land and air into life.  The result is The Martian, a captivating and absolutely hilarious memoir of survival that sees him battling physics with ingenuity and despair with laughter 'til the very end.

The Martian is easily the most entertaining science fiction novel I've read, a story of  relentless problem-solving and dogged humor.  It's not Mark's story alone -- Weir  occasionally zooms back to Earth as NASA tries to cope, and  he occasionally shifts to a third-person narrative when something colossally bad is about to happen to our stubborn survivor -- but most of The Martian is told, journal-form, recording Mark's reactions, plans, and thoughts on life so far from humanity. He is never free from worry; no sooner has he found to solve a problem by physics, chemistry, botany, or setting something on fire, than does something else go wrong. Sometimes solutions create their own problems, because his resources are limited and not even an engineer-botanist can think of everything. Add to that the fact that Mars is an environment hostile to human life, a severe place that punishes mistakes with death (freezing, exploding,  starving, take your pick), and there's no end to his troubles. But he never stops trying, and he never becomes dispirited permanently. There's no one on the planet to have  a pity party with, and nothing to do but try to put the pieces back together again and move on.  Eventually the story widens; Mark can't communicate with Earth, but they do have satellites, and the only bit of life on the entire planet can't avoid being noticed forever. If he can only find a way to endure!  Despite the seriousness of his situation, the narrative is easy-going, almost light-hearted. Mark is keeping logs to keep track of his progress and maintain his sanity, not give an audience a respectable tale of man vs. the elements. He records in detail his thinking about wrangling technical problems, but he's also constantly joking or complaining or chattering.. ("I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for.")  Part of the appeal of The Martian is the fact that, though this is science-fiction, it's not far removed from contemporary technology; the people in this novel  don't need any background, because they're us. This is an immensely personable science-adventure story, abounding in puzzles and smart remarks.  It's quite impressive considering it's Andy Weir's first work, and I would definitely recommend  it, especially to those with any interest at all in space flight.

"[The laptop] died instantly. The screen went black before I was out of the outlock. Turns out the 'L' in 'LCD' stands for 'Liquid'. I guess it either froze or boiled off. Maybe I'll have to post a consumer review: 'Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10'."

Related: 
"Founding Father", Isaac Asimov. Also about astronauts trying to survive in a hostile world after things go badly.

Sky Walking

Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir
© 2007 Tom Jones
384 pages

Although the exploration of space has a scientific edge, the first astronauts were not scientists: they were military pilots. Thomas Jones is no exception, establishing the foundation for his career in NASA as an Air Force pilot, but his aspirations for space were definitely those of a man of science, not those of a hot-dogging jockey out to set records and prove his manliness. A member of the astronaut class of 1990,  Jones took part in no less than four Space Shuttle missions,  advancing science as a mission specialist. Jones' Sky Walking is one of two shuttle-era astronaut memoirs, the other being Mike Mullane's Riding Rickets; and of the two, Jones is easily superior. This detailed memoir, grounded not just in memory but in Jones' mission logs and letters home,  offers a look at NASA in transition as the age of the space race gave way to one of geopolitical cooperation in the building of the International Space Station -- a project Jones had a hand in. While a shuttle memoir doesn't ripple with explosive excitement like that of an Apollo astronaut's,  Jones is a sturdy guide to NASA of the 1990s -- a thorough and professional author whose attitude combines Right Stuff-era dutifulness with a scientist's excitement at what new knowledge science missions in space might produce.

Although his career spanned over a decade, Jones never sold that idea to his wife. When he applied to be an astronaut, it was over assurances to her that in the unlikely event that they accepted him, he'd be in the program for four years at most -- a year of training, followed by a couple of flights 'up'.   Jones brought something to the program that NASA administrators liked, however:  he was chosen for his first mission before more senior astronauts who'd waited for years for their first flight into the black, and remained a popular choice for a series of missions thereafter, totaling four. Jones' first two missions were expressly scientific, as he helped deliver and begin operating a new form of orbital radar operated from the shuttle that  allowed data receivers on the ground to see far more deeply into the Earth's crust than ever before. Jones' latter missions were tied to the International Space Station: after his crew proved the feasibility of orbital construction procedures, he delivered and established the Destiny laboratory module, the core of the International Space Station. Although each of these missions were successes, the memoir is not without its disappointments: on his third mission, Jones and his companions were frustrated to find that they'd endured months of  rigorous mission-specific training and faced the prospect of rocket-fueled death to get into space, only to arrive in orbit and find their door wouldn't open to let them do their extravehicular work -- or spacewalk.  The birth of the ISS program was not a storied triumph, either:   although Jones chiefly chronicles his own missions, NASA's general history of the time is provided as context.  NASA in the 1990s was an agency struggling to find a purpose for itself. The moon was forgotten in the history books and the shuttle program firmly operational.  With Mars out of the question and the government not particularly supportive of any big projects, NASA was left with half-considered plans for a space station called "Freedom". Bumbling bureaucracy and chronic budget overruns sapped virtually everyone's enthusiasm for it: even Jones and the other astronauts, for whom the station would be a guarantor of work,  regarded it with skepticism. The International Space Station wasn't planned as such; it emerged as a product of compromise.

Those interested in the shuttle program will find Jones' memoir of interest, as he's generous with  details. His missions have far more appeal than those of fellow shuttle memoir-writer Mike Mullane's, whose shuttle  trips were classified runs for the Department of Defense.(Without being able to say much about his missions, Mullane used much of his ink to complain about NASA politics and tell bawdy stories.)  Although Jones' story easily  holds interest, it doesn't exactly command it:  Jones isn't an aggressive author who screams "LOOK AT ME!"  He writes not just as an astronaut, but as a science educator, and so the work requires some focus on the part of the reader. As much as I appreciated Jones' professional style, the occasional glimpses of his personality, like his account of being mesmerized by the slow-turning globe under his feet, kept the work from being reading too much like a debriefing.  The resonance these lapses in the military staccato added would have helped the memoir connect even more easily with general readers, though the odd few dry moments scarcely detract from Sky Walking's appeal. Jones' memoirs offer readers an education into the intensive, prolonged training that astronauts endure, a story of NASA scientists at their finest, and a look into the birth of the International Space Station, inspiring despite its difficult birth. With the shuttle program behind us, and the next crew vehicle Orion not yet operational,  it also provides a look back to the days when American astronauts flew high on ships of their own.

Related:

• Riding Rockets, Mike Mullane. 
• Space Station: Base Camps to the Stars, Roger Launius. I read this a few years back, but it may have predated the blog..
• Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System;  NASA for Dummies, Tom Jones
• Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space, John Young

Astronaut Wives Club

The Astronaut Wives Club
© 2013 Lily Koppell
288 pages

When a gang of test pilots joined the Mercury program, they and those who followed them didn't have an inkling of what was to come-- and their wives, their unwitting partners in an unexpected story -- knew even less.   In part, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo only prolonged the misery they knew as the wives of test pilots: they were married to men who were never home, who had a one in four shot of dying every time they went to work, and whose military career seemed more like juvenile adventurism than noble service.  But when pilots became astronauts, those worried wives became the partners of instant celebrities, subject to more scrutiny than they could have ever anticipated.

The Astronaut Wives Club is the story of the harried women who kept the home fires burning while their men, basking in glory and adulation, put fire in the sky. Lily Koppell is a chatty social historian whose account demonstrates how the ladies of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo adapted to the new stresses of their celebrity-wife status, whose homes became the backdrops of national dramas every launch, who were accosted in grocery stories by reporters -- including news hacks who beat a path to the doors of new widows to ask how they felt about their husbands' demise, arriving even before the NASA officials who were to respectfully deliver the bad news. In addition to facing the prospect of their husbands dying horribly -- running out of air and leaving bodies to circle in lunar orbit forever, perhaps?  --  and living under the public eye, having to keep the home and kids looking shipshape to satisfy the Powers that Be and shut the mouths of gossip columnists -- the wives also had to contend with the fact that their superstar husbands were taking an endless stream of "Cape Cookies" to bed. The combination of  cocky, accomplished, and adulated men working in Florida states apart from their wives in Houston, and the presence of young things in miniskirts batting their eyes at the big ol' heroes -- was a bad one for the astronaut's home lives: few marriages survived the space program.

Although early on Koppell fancies the idea of the story of the astronaut wives being one of American women coming into their own, a link with the feminist movement never strongly materializes:  the manners and mores of the astronaut homes were a decade behind those of the popular culture at large, though 'progress' in the form of splintering marriages  increased when it became obvious that NASA didn't really care if the astronauts cheated, so long  as public scandal was avoided So long as they were landing on the Moon, who cared about serial affairs?   Absent of precedent, and left to fend for themselves by NASA, the astro-wives fell back on one another, relying on one another for moral and personal support. They met in one anothers' homes to share their worries and woes, especially helpful given that they were under orders not to burden their husbands with anything -- hence why Jim Lovell didn't realize that all three of his children had their tonsils removed until after he and his wife were leaving town. This is more evident in the Mercury program, when there were only seven wives in a tight-knit circle: as their numbers expanded, first with the New Nine and then additional astronaut classes each with a dozen men at least, cohesion faded.  This is sadly true of the book as well. Though it starts out with a clear focus on the response of the Mercury wives to their new role as being to national icons, as more subjects enter the picture, Koppell drifts, and this combined with her casual  approach means the book loses much of its potential punch, feeling scattered by midway.

The Astronaut Wives Club is an interesting  if weak look into the 'home front' of the space program, with appeal for readers who want to learn a little more about an aspect of the space race that is only lightly touched on at best elsewhere, or readers interested in the lives of accidentally-famous women. Though based in part on interviews with living astronaut wives, it's more serviceable as a diversion than a comprehensive treatment of the subjects.