"... I send my rockets forth between my ears, Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years."
(Ray Bradbury, as quoted in Murray's book)

Dealing with "The First Thirty Years of Space Exploration", this book does so from the unique point of view of the Bruce Murray, who started his space career as postdoc at Caltech to become director of JPL succeeding Pickering during the troublesome years between Viking and Galileo.

Far from being a generic historical book, this is not only a personal account of JPL's space achievements and troubles, but also a review of world space events and the political scenario that supported them. Comparisons of Russian effort versus American ones are one of the main 'leit motive' that populate the book, the others being JPL's technological advances that enabled new missions, scientific discoveries and political behind-the-scenes revelations.

After Mariner 4 (beating the Russian in the race to the Red Planet only because of their initial failures) put to rest definetely the hopes of Percival Lowell for canals, and a civilization, on Mars, NASA and JPL enjoyed a golden age of successes, perhaps a little bit shadowed by Apollo and other events. And while Russians achievements on Venus (including the first landings there) couldn't compare with Sputnik's "cold shower", JPL had to wait many years before making a serious difference also on that planet and not without huge political struggles. From the early efforts toward Venus, a mission to Mercury was born, Mariner 10, again after a mighty struggle for the budget. And the same mission got a bonus when the opportunity for a second fly-by was discovered thanks to "the giant brain of Giuseppe Colombo" the Italian scientist who also proposed an explanation of puzzling radar results from Arecibo (he proposed the fact that Mercury was not tidal-locked locked the Moon, but rotated on its polar axis in a precise way).

And then came Viking, the most expensive and grandest and hugely successful mission at the time, which opened the dream of humans visiting Mars soon. But after that, we learn about the cutbacks that forced the Grand Tour to non-existence to be later resurrected as Voyager, thus opening a long series of successes at the outer planets on a relatively constrained budget that squeezed all the capabilities of the JPL minds. But despite the great public success of Voyager, NASA administration was very cold about deep space exploration, and concentrated all the efforts in developing a flying the Space Shuttle, the dream machine that promised an easy and low-cost access to space.

In the wake of constant cuts in budgets not related to the Shuttle, we learn how JPL had to battle for every penny, and how many proposals were lost. The VOIR mission to Venus was able to become the hugely successful mission that Magellan was to be, and Galileo, born as Jupiter Orbiter and Probe mission, underwent a development, and subsequent re-developments, defining a story of truly Omeric proportions. Galileo in particular was a case in point to prove the unwise decision to get rid of expendable launchers favoring the Space Shuttle to do any job. Risking the life of astronauts to carry satellites into orbit not only didn't make sense, but also created a backlog of missions that increased the pressure on achieving impractical flight schedules. And interplanetary missions must stick to strict planetary schedules to achieve their goals within budget.

During the delays and cost-overruns of the Shuttle program, the first international cooperations on exploration started to strain too. First was the sudden withdrawn of NASA from partnership with ESA on the two satellites mission known as International Solar Polar Mission. NASA was to provide launch services by means of a Shuttle-borne Centaur upper stage (a tragically dangerous idea that luckily died in the wake of the Challenger disaster). When this happened, ESA, starting to show its guts, decided to proceed on her own with a single probe that became the highly successful Ulysses mission, recently de-activated after many years of outstanding discoveries.

Another big loss was a chance to visit Halley's comet during is 1986 passage as part of the international efforts to study this historical visitor. JPL's Louis Friedman conceived a revolutionary solar sail program to investigate the program as part of the "Halley Armada" but all those efforts, and subsequent ones, where lost after political debates. In March 1986 the Armada scored a complete success with Japanes and Russians probes supporting the close-up investigation of the small, but exceptional, European Giotto probe that pictured a comet nucleus for the first time in human history. America observed from afar, re-cycling the ISEE probe into the International Comet Explorer.

The relationship between robotic exploration and human spaceflight started to strain (as they are today) because of the Shuttle program. However, when Challanger exploded, we learn from the book how deep was the grief in the whole NASA family and how recovery opened up again chances not only for deep space exploration but also to safer operations in Low Earth Orbit. And as this book talks about people, we get to know many of the hidden, or forgotten, names behind JPL successful missions and their roles in those years.

In brief, this book is a very readable, human and passionate account of the beginning of space eploration from a different viewpoint. A viewpoint that is important to consider today, more than at any other time, because the important events that are happening in the American space program. It is difficult to be sure now what will be the outcome of the new direction mandated by the current US Administration, but the past is here to provide insight and perspective: talking about space exploration and vision without remembering the lost opportunities that the Shuttle and the original Space Station design demanded, is not wise. History always repeats itself and this book might prove a useful reminder.

A used copy of the book might be available through Boggs Spacebooks.

Title: Journey Into Space

Author: Bruce Murray

Editor: W. W. Norton

Year: 1989