Aiming for the Stars: The Dreamers and Doers of the Space Age

From Johannes Kepler's 17th-century drawing board to the Mars Society's Web site; from Apollo XI to Apollo XIII; from Russia's Mir space station (scheduled to return to Earth in bits) to American robots (scheduled to return to Mars, but when?), the story of human endeavors in outer space has plenty of physics and engineering, plenty of drama, plenty of heroism and not a few bits of hubris and folly. Crouch (whose previous work includes The Bishop's Boys, a biography of the Wright brothers) has produced a book far more informative than his gung-ho title suggests: his book explains, very accessibly, the prehistory and history of space flight, mixing accounts of key players (well known and unknown) with relevant technical and political history. Crouch covers not only rocket science pioneer Robert Goddard, but his German counterpart, Hermann Oberth, who in 1923 published Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space). Another chapter covers the U.S. and Soviet race to recruit ex-Nazi scientists: after Sputnik, a Pentagon spokesman was heard to complain, ""We got the wrong Germans!"" Wernher von Braun plays a big role in Crouch's account, but so do Soviet space expert Sergei Korolev, Caltech's eccentric experts John Parsons and Theodore von K rm n (who worked to invent better rocket motors) and the able technocrat James Webb, who took the helm of NASA after Kennedy promised the U.S. public the moon. Later chapters deal ably with the space stations of the 1970s, the space shuttle missions of the 1980s and the current use of commercial satellites and unmanned space exploration. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Oct.)