Product Description
It was all part of man’s greatest adventure–landing men on the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge of the universe and the birth of stars, and launching planetary explorers across the solar system to Neptune and beyond.
The ancient dream of breaking gravity’s hold and taking to space became a reality only because of the intense cold-war rivalry between the superpowers, with towering geniuses like Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolyo… More >>
This New Ocean : The Story of the First Space Age
Tags: ancient dream, edge of the universe, geniuses, men on the moon, neptune, rivalry, solar system, space age, superpowers, wernher von braun
#1 by Anonymous on July 1, 2010 - 7:18 am
An exhaustive and outstanding compendium that catalogues the entire space effort over the past fifty years with emphasis on both civilian and military ventures as well as manned and unmanned ventures. I have been reading about the space program for over 20 years and I was impressed with the amount of detail that the author was able to uncover. I also very much like the way he gave equal time to the oft-ignored gemini program and the equally ignored mariner and viking missions. In contrast to other reader reviews, I found his political commentary to be relatively fair. Overall, a great read but only one for those with a deep and genuine interest in all aspects of the subject. 700 pages of dense material. “Lost Moon” it is not.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Anonymous on July 1, 2010 - 8:31 am
William Burrows has compiled a complete and detailed history of the space program from the earliest thoughts and writings about the nature of space and space travel, to the present day struggles of NASA with the space station. Especially interesting is his tracing of the dynamic tension and close brotherhood between the “civilian” space program and the “military” program, although they were supposed to be separate.
As a long-time worker in the civilian space program I can attest to the accuracy of Burrow’s writing about it. The only flaw in the book is its tendency to belabor the same points a bit, e.g. that the military and civilian space programs were inextricably linked. Also, the book is so replete with names that it can be a little confusing.
Nevertheless, this is a book that should be on the shelf of everyone interested in space exploration.
Rating: 4 / 5
#3 by Kevin W. Parker on July 1, 2010 - 9:37 am
Whew! I feel as if I’ve spent a significant chunk of my life reading this book! It’s a sweeping history of the space program that delves deeply into the background and circumstances, so much so that it’s not till the halfway point of the book that it gets to Gagarin, Shepard, and the first manned space flights.
The first part is actually the strongest, covering in detail what went before (going clear back to Daedalus!), particularly the contributions of Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, and the German V-2 team.
Even when it does get to what we think of as the space program proper, technogeeks may be disappointed because it’s short on technical detail but but long on the individuals and circumstances responsible for the rockets: not what the Saturn V was but how and why it came to be.
The breadth leads to some mildly startling brevity: Apollo 11 is covered in a sometimes annoyingly inaccurate three pages: The alarms on the landing approach were not “ignored” by the controller but understood as not being critical, and there were more than six seconds of fuel left in the engines at touchdown.
But there are other books for that (Chaikin’s of course being the first to come to mind). What I read here but not elsewhere in addition to the background included extensive coverage of the military space program, particularly reconaissance satellites but also the never-to-be Dyna-Soar and Manned Orbiting Laboratory programs.
Weaknesses include a jarring tendency for the author to abruptly step forward and insert his own opinions, usually in sentence fragments; a sometimes glib, too-clever tone; oblique references to incidents or people mentioned ten or fifty or hundreds of pages ago that the author expects the reader to pick up on; the occasional inaccuracy, as with Apollo 11 above or with the Ariane rocket described as French rather than European; and an appallingly bad index which, among other gaps, has no mention of Project Gemini despite fairly good coverage in the book itself.
And the final chapter, covering the present and future of the space program, seems to be the weakest. It comes across as kind of a laundry list of what’s going on and what’s planned: Hubble, lunar mining, Pathfinder, Cassini, John Glenn’s shuttle flight, future Mars missions, Zubrin’s plans, terraforming Mars, and the possibility of missions to the stars all take a brief moment on the stage before being ushered off again.
Still, it’s an awesome feat to cover in one book the history of the space program in all of its manifestations: Russian, American, manned, unmanned, military, civilian. I was impressed and will likely be referring back to this book often.
Rating: 4 / 5
#4 by Anonymous on July 1, 2010 - 11:19 am
The first two chapters offer a summary of humankind’s attempts at space travel OVER THE LAST THOUSAND PLUS YEARS — information which can be found easily no where else. From early Chinese rocketry to the public ridiclue suffered by Goddard, Burrows offers the most intelligently written comprehensive text on the history of space exploration available, with a constant, striking sense of humor. After the second chapter his writing becomes a much more obtuse, detailed study, but only because he conveys that much more information — if you are serious about the subject, there is no more important source. Please read it. Please pass it to a friend. We need more authors as inspiring as this one and this book needs more readers! If you are writing fiction, a historical study, a screenplay, or doing general research — PLEASE — do not consider your work complete without having finished this wonderful book!
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by Kenneth Gosier on July 1, 2010 - 2:15 pm
I enjoyed this book very much, and thought it filled a niche I hadn’t thought of before. Its strongest focus seems to be on the political environment of space exploration, where “political” has 2 meanings: 1) The traditional fight for funds in the US Congress and also the environments in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and 2) the infighting for limited funds among the different areas of the civilian and military space establishments. (The “office politics” of space, if you will.)
In this context, the book could be thought of as a space history from a management point of view. There’s not a lot of technical detail here, esp. for those who have read a lot of space books. But Burrows does a good job of explaining why certain decisions were made in the different programs, given the historical context. It leads to a greater understanding of why we have the systems we have today, and how they have evolved, fight by political fight. The parts about the US spy satellites, the space shuttle, and solar system exploration were definitely enlightening from this point of view.
As noted with other reviews, “This New Ocean” has rather startling breadth, but sometimes maddeningly little depth. This is OK and to be expected in a survey book; my only problem was that it felt uneven. Some parts were covered with a broad stroke that gave the outlines but not every last detail, while others felt tacked on or thrown in. In particular, the development of the Russian space program after Khrushchev felt shallow, esp. coming after an extended section on the US program. This was a little unsatisfying, given the importance of Russian rockets in the more commercial environment of the post-Cold War world.
Overall though, this book is clearly recommended reading. It enlarged my view beyond just the science and technology to see how things get done, and has stimulated me and made me aware of new areas and ideas to learn about.
Rating: 4 / 5