A New Year of Book Reviews
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Hayley photo via @hayleyarc
"Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey," Fred Haise with Bill Moore, 2022.
I always wondered if Fred Haise would write a book and, if so, how he’d accomplish it. After all, he had the unenviable task of being the “other guy” from one of the most famous space missions ever. Jim Lovell, his commander, not only had written a book about their moon flight together, it has been made into a hit movie starring Tom Hanks. When your entire time in space took place only a few feet from Lovell – how do you write something original of your own?
Haise succeeds because the Apollo 13 mission is just one part of a rich life of engineering and aviation. He begins with warm family anecdotes of his All-American childhood, like a conversation with a favorite grandparent.
The book enlivens when Haise starts talking about airplanes. Like fellow astronaut Tom Stafford’s memoir, Haise glosses over the personal and goes right for the reverence and love he feels for flying. It picks up further when Haise describes his time working on the Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions to the moon. It’s a unique front row seat to history. His fierce attention to engineering detail is somewhat addictive to read, and the reader will greater appreciate the fiendish complexity of getting the Apollo spacecraft readied. He’s such an engineer that when he later describes seeing ancient ruins in Crete, he mostly talks of his fascination that the centuries-old piping was swaged (yes, I had to look it up too).
Haise’s calm, test pilot demeanor infuses his level-headed description of the disastrous Apollo 13 explosion: it fits in well with the rest of the book. There is no panic, no drama, just puzzlement and an urge to find a solution and return home. Instead of feeling his life was at risk, Haise seemed to have spent more time feeling his lunar mission training had been a waste.
I was personally fascinated by Haise’s descriptions of working on early space shuttle design, flowing into his leading role testing the shuttle on its first runway landings. His love of flying illuminates these moments in ways I do not recall reading elsewhere.
Rounding out the book, Haise describes his work creating a legacy for future generations with his remarkable efforts to create the Infinity Science Center in Mississippi. It’s proof that history-making people like Fred Haise never truly retire.
“Wild Ride: A Memoir of I.V. Drips and Rocket Ships,” Hayley Arceneaux with Sandra Bark, 2022.
Any book that begins with a Smashmouth quote, followed by a conversation with a dog, is not going to be your typical spacefarer memoir. And sure enough, Arceneaux’s book is likely to be much more the kind of book we see in the future, as new generations head to space.
It’s not just an age thing; it’s an indication that people are flying in space with no prior urge to do so. It’s easier than ever to grab a seat, if you have the money or, in Arceneaux’s case, are in precisely the right place at the right time.
A childhood survivor of bone cancer, with an artificial femur in one leg as a result, Arceneaux vividly portrays what it is like to be a child when you receive a cancer diagnosis. The portrayal of chemotherapy at the age of ten is tough to read precisely because the perennially cheery author tries to make the best of it. As she explains, she kept trying to find the sweetness in life at a time when adults tried to “bubble wrap” her from bad news, despite wishing people would stop treating her differently. It’s revealing, relatable, and worth the read for these chapters alone, never mind space flight.
Her positive, outgoing attitude to life could have grown a little same-y, but I never felt that in reading this book – instead, it is heartwarming.
There are intriguing descriptions of her training for her space mission to help raise money for St. Jude, the hospital that saved her life and her workplace at the time of selection. It was interesting to learn about her experiences in a centrifuge, worried that her leg implant would break, and her realization that she had to speak up when she was in pain in a spacecraft couch not designed for her needs. It’s a window into what will have to happen to make space accessible to all. SpaceX sounds like it was wonderfully proactive in designing a user-friendly couch for her once they learned a change was needed.
I could feel how different a background Arceneaux has from prior spacefarer generations at moments such as when she compared pre-flight quarantine to being in a sorority house. I also felt her difference in age to the usual spacefarers when, once in orbit, she makes a mental list of all the places she wants to visit as a tourist. She’s at the point early enough in life where it’s all excitingly possible.
There was a lovely moment pre-launch when, having had a final phone call with her family, she consciously detaches herself from earthly concerns and attachments. It’s an impression that has stuck with me long after finishing the book.
I was reminded of Helen Sharman’s excellent 1993 memoir, Seize the Moment – as the first Briton in space, and similarly a young woman not from a space background, Sharman was catapulted into a new realm and had to do things such as balance her existing day job with the demands of a forthcoming space mission. We’re going to see a lot more people having to juggle such choices as space flight becomes increasingly accessible.
“Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Spaceflight,” Margaret Weitekamp, 2022.
I’ll admit to an extreme bias in favor of this book from the moment I began reading it. Margaret Weitekamp is chair of the Space History department at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, and I’ve been a long-time follower of her work and reader of what she has published. This book is smartly and deftly written, as befits a museum professional at the top of their game.
Weitekamp compares American space achievements to American dreams of manifest destiny, weaving in comparisons to science fiction. This is not a new theme for a writer – but this book, by being appropriately critical on matters of gender and ethnicity, is much more contemporary for a mainstream publication. It’s a welcome take.
As a book by a Smithsonian curator, published by Smithsonian Books, using examples from the museum’s collection, it’s not too surprising that the book at times reads like an advertisement for Weitekamp’s institution. It’s appropriately done, however, as Weitekamp shows how the museum has constantly changed over time as audiences evolve. New audiences no longer personally recall events such as the moon landing; they were not yet born.
The author showcases how toys and fictional space characters reflect and draw from the society they spring from. Dreams of space travel, it turns out, are often a cultural mirror. Contrary to past accounts of this social history which often show futuristic dreams only in glowing terms, Weitekamp also shows how they often reflected racist fears of invasion as much as the promise of a better future. Her special viewpoint as a curator of the nation’s collection allows her to showcase symbols of the science fiction aspirations or fears of the eras she discusses.
At times, Weitekamp looks beyond an America-centric view to a more global mix of cultures. Only Euro-American cultures were examined in this book in terms of their space mythologies, something which puzzled me at first, but as I continued to read I understood she was sticking close to a mainstream American cultural story. It is not necessarily a bad thing that entire other chapters, indeed other books, could detail what she omits. This book is an overview, and as such it moves through history quickly.
It's not necessarily fair therefore to criticize the book in terms of what I would have preferred it to do. Its academic style means that Weitekamp often introduces a theme and then uses historical facts or museum objects to prove it by example. The book would have been more fun if it had been more of a narrative than evidential. But that’s not the book she was writing, and this book I think achieves her presumed aims well.
The dawn of mainstream science fiction and how this evolved into the Cold War era space reality has been well covered in other books: I was curious to see how Weitekamp discussed the less-covered ground of more recent decades.
Weitekamp chronicles how NASA embraced the Star Trek convention fandom of the 1970s, a time of downturn for both the science fiction franchise and for American human space flight. I had heard in the past that the National Air & Space Museum had not been so accommodating in those years to the idea of science fiction exhibitions mingling with their flown-in-space artifacts. Weitekamp corrected this misassumption for me, showing how Star Trek had been brought into the fold early and boldly.
There are some errors in the book – most I only know because of my own geekery. In the James Bond movie Moonraker, Weitekamp asserts that a stolen space shuttle “flies away and seemingly crashes” – close, but not quite. The villain is never a “playboy” as described – instead, he seems rather ascetic. The people chosen to repopulate the world as part of the villain’s scheme are a variety of ethnicities, not all white as Weitekamp asserts. But these are minor quibbles.
Moving into Gen X territory Weitekamp writes, to my mind, some strikingly original stuff. She explains how space-themed programs for youth were no longer the domain of liberal imagination. In the Reagan era, they were mostly touted as business-friendly contrasts to fracturing family lives and – in Republican eyes at least – the resulting decline in inspiring paths forward for kids. There is a wonderful line about “space-themed programs that preached a metaphorical gospel of the redemptive power of spaceflight.” I’d never thought of this era in this way, and I think Weitekamp gets it right.
The book talks a lot about Star Trek – and how it gradually loses its place at the cultural forefront. Weitekamp shows a changing America of the 1980s, where the revived show’s ham-fisted attempts to portray same-gender relationships caused a good deal of annoyance for not going far enough.
By the time Star Trek: Insurrection was released in movie theaters in 1998, the series was essentially nostalgia for a television show. Weitekamp perhaps places too much emphasis on the movie’s ethnic blandness in her book: by this point, Star Trek movies were about as relevant to American culture as an old rerun of Murder, She Wrote. Weitekamp nails it however in her analysis of Star Trek post-9/11, where it faded into cancellation while clumsily trying to capture a new national mood. The reboots of Battlestar Galactica and War of The Worlds, she explains, got it right.
Staying close to the mainstream, Weitekamp covers Armageddon, Deep Impact, and the Apollo 13 movie. I wish she had veered a little further from the cultural mainstream into less well-known corners that would reflect the breadth of the culture. Yet I understand how much she has to cover in this relatively brief book. She follows with a good-if-fast overview of space and science fiction via the internet, eBay, convention culture, and social media.
There’s a much longer book straining to get out of this volume. I think that may be a plus, as – just like a good museum visit – the reader will hopefully go away with dozens of new avenues to chase up.