If you have even a moderate interest in the history of the space program, suit up, belt yourself in securely, and prepare for a fantastic ride. Jay Gallentine, a film and video professional in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has produced what might just be the definitive history, Ambassadors From Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft. From the earliest days, both in the Soviet Union and the United States, Gallentine traces the history of space exploration in wonderful detail, scientist by scientist, development by development, scientific decision by political decision. And of course, failure after failure after smashing success.
Reading that description, you might think a book like this would be rather a dull history, a mere recounting of events, dates, and names. But you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Yes, Gallentine researched all those things to within an inch of their lives, interviewing countless participants, reading reports and mountains of documents, collecting photographs (some never seen before), and so on. So all the important details are here. But with his casual, conversational style and keen storytelling ability, he brings the events to life in a tale that is absolutely riveting.
Beginning with James Van Allen’s discovery of the radiation belts around the earth, then backtracking to the first development of rockets by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States during World War Two, the tale soon splits into two main branches, following teams of scientists in the USSR and the US as they race to find ways of getting first a satellite into space, and then finally a living being. Much of the American history is well-known if you look in the right places, but Gallentine presents information from the Soviet side that nobody on this side of the Iron Curtain ever knew before. The book would be worth reading for that alone.
Yet even on “this side,” the public never knew the hair-tearing frustrations so many scientists lived with as they wrestled to get rockets off the ground in the first place, then had to deal with budgets, radiation, fuel loads, and how to fit cameras and experimental equipment into the smallest space possible that would still let them work optimally. Nor did most of us know how much of the work was political, either struggling to get the politicians on their side or, sometimes worse, having them on their side and then having to live up to their impossible demands and deadlines. (Khrushchev wants a six-month already-impossible satellite schedule moved up three months to coincide with a significant Soviet anniversary? Piece of cake, right?)
Occasionally Gallentine’s style gets just a bit too “gosh darnit” for comfort. But those brief moments are quickly forgotten as he sweeps you into the next big development, and then the casual style puts you right in the moment. Take this description of the discussions about whether a ship like Voyager could even get through the asteroid belt:
Only three years beforehand some of the greatest minds in planetary science had locked themselves in rooms and sweatily banged their fists on the table and decidedly proclaimed that it couldn’t be done. PhD’s hung in the room like cigarette smoke. With neckties loosened and veins popping, the researchers tore into their paperwork and flip charts and frenetically squabbled. Papers flew. Nobody stopped talking. They drank gallons of coffee, hurled brimstone and lightning bolts, and preached sermons of destruction.
Gallentine brings the main characters in the space exploration race vividly alive, and puts you on the edge of your seat as the story progresses, even while you already know how it turned out. And as he reaches the crescendo of the story, the brilliant performance of the two Voyager spacecraft in exploring the outer planets, you can hardly breathe as you wait with the scientists in heart-stopping suspense to see whether the cameras and instruments that worked so well at Jupiter would perform more wonders as they approached Saturn…then Uranus…then Neptune…
If you love the idea of space exploration, and have any interest at all in how the human race started with missiles and ended up going to the Moon and extending its consciousness into the farthest reaches of the solar system, you will want this book. Ambassadors From Earth has just been published in hardcover by the University of Nebraska Press, as of November, 2009. (You can read an excerpt here.)
(This book was an expiring ebook which I received from NetGalley.)
