Born to Explore: John Casani’s Grand Tour of the Solar System

In this unfocused biography, space historian Gallentine (Infinity Beckoned) chronicles the career of John Casani, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was central to several historic NASA deep space missions. Casani was the project manager of the Galileo mission in the 1980s, which sent a probe into space to study Jupiter and its moons. The project, Gallentine explains, faced years of delays due to technical difficulties and a halt to the program in the wake of the 1986 Challenger explosion. Finally launching in 1989, the mission yielded an immense amount of data about Jupiter, including spectacular pictures of the “Curtain of Fire,” an active volcano on one of its moons. Casani was also project manager for the Cassini mission, which sent a probe to study Saturn in 1997. It had its share of challenges, including concerns a crash would contaminate potentially habitable moons, but was a success, providing insight into the structure of Saturn and its largest moon, Titan, which was discovered to contain surprisingly Earth-like features. There are entertaining details throughout, like the process of wrapping spacecrafts in protective layers of aluminized Mylar to enable them to withstand blistering heat and freezing cold, but the text is often bogged down by extraneous details, like the movies that premiered the same year Sputnik launched, and few insights are given into what made Casani’s leadership style unique. Readers will be frustrated. (Dec.)