New Space Books Worth A Read
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All those excuses you had that stopped you from reading more books… I suspect you don’t have them any more, am I right?
Here are three interesting new ones…
“To The Moon: The Autobiography of an Apollo Astronaut’s Daughter,” Rosemary Roosa, 2019.
As we have seen with books such as “Hidden Figures” in recent years, there has been a marked shift toward more behind-the-scenes stories when it comes to tales of space exploration. The experiences of the families of astronauts, however, have always been of interest to the public. From the beginning of the Space Age, reporters clamored for photos and quotes from astronaut wives and kids in an attempt to provide some human background for otherworldly explorations.
Astronauts such as John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are still household names. Others, such as Apollo 14's Stu Roosa, are found only in history books.
Roosa flew to the moon and spent longer orbiting solo than anyone had done before. However, he flew two years after the Apollo 11 mission, by which time the media had mostly lost interest in lunar exploration. A quiet, self-contained man who died at the young age of 61, Roosa slipped from the memory of all but the most ardent space enthusiasts.
This was never the case, of course, with his family. His daughter, Rosemary Roosa, shares a beautifully loving tale of her parents, from the moment they met until, decades apart, each of them passed away. It’s a fascinating tale, and their NASA years are only one element of a rich and varied life. The inevitable question of what to do with your career after flying to the moon is one that Stu Roosa wrestled with as much as any of his fellow spacefarers. In the years following her father's death, Rosemary’s attachment to her mother, Joan, is a heartwarming story of companionship, with the sad twist of unresolved sibling disagreements after Joan died.
Outside of this family love story, the other main theme of the book is adventure. Whether flying to the moon, pursuing outdoor activities such as hunting and boating, or traveling the world, this family rarely stayed still.
Stu Roosa has already been the subject of a memoir, Willie Moseley’s 2011 book “Smoke Jumper, Moon Pilot.” Moseley’s solid work gathered everything publicly known about a private individual, but Moseley never had the fortune to meet his subject. Rosemary Roosa had no such obstacle. In fact, as her book describes, she continues her father’s legacy by planting saplings around the world, the offspring of “Moon Trees” grown from seeds her father flew with him around the moon. It’s an engaging window into the lives of a family who experienced what only a tiny number ever did.
“Escape From Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket,” Fraser MacDonald, 2019.
This book has a somewhat misleading title, which often happens in the hands of an overzealous publisher-promoter. In this case, I’m glad. Not a rocket history, this book is actually more of an intense dive into secret FBI files to tell the story of a number of early rocket engineers who are generally overlooked. The author makes a persuasive case that shifting political winds, and suspicions raised in the Red Scares of the early 1950s, buried their legacy. He does so at a relentless pace that reminded me of the thrill of some gossipy Hollywood tell-alls – which is not a negative here either.
In a book that often reads like a True Crime story, we’re taken through declassified files into a world of surveillance, espionage – and, almost incidentally, rockets. The scrappy early days of 1930s American rocketry, centered in Southern California and the facility that would eventually become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), are recounted using the personal lives of a bunch of inventors, at a time when rocket-makers were generally seen as crackpots. The primary focus is one named Frank Malina. The toxic, dangerous experiments of Malina and his colleagues take place in dirty, sweaty conditions and yield disappointing results: they lug rockets into nearby canyons only to see their experiments explode. Their squabbles and infighting are written as if chronicling the rise and fall of a rock band. I kept visualizing The Marx Brothers and their zany antics. However, it was a different kind of Marxism that deeply affected the lives of this bunch of oddballs and outsiders.
A number of these inventors drifted into the circles of American Communism. Anti-fascist from personal experience, including escape from the rise of Nazism in Europe, most were also pro-union and anti-segregation. At the time, the anti-war, pro-Civil Rights discussions they attended seemed to them a positive counterpoint to some of the ideas of their Caltech contemporaries, who the book states were frequently anti-Semitic and fiercely conservative.
When World War Two broke out and America united with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, diverse opinions were tolerated. But global alliances changed quickly after the war. The Soviet Union became the Cold War enemy. MacDonald writes eloquently about how Wernher von Braun’s rocketry team – who had made Nazi war weapons using slave labor – had their morally reprehensible past quietly airbrushed in the name of rocketry. This team of inventors, however, did not. That is why, the author states, they are not well known.
The book shows how, at the height of the Red Scare in early 1950s America, people with even the slightest associations with Russians were investigated, and often lost their jobs. Of course, some of them were in ironic positions of sympathy to Communism while building rockets designed to defend against the Soviet Union. There were even Soviet spies, of course. But other witch hunts were more shortsighted, such as the story of Qian Xuesen, a genius physicist and rocket pioneer who was unwillingly hounded back to his native China, only to work on atomic weapons and birth the Chinese space program, neither of which were in America’s long term interests.
While highlighting these lesser known names, MacDonald isn’t afraid to take on many of the luminaries of rocket lore while stating his case. Robert Goddard, for example, is portrayed as an uncooperative loner, paranoid about his treasured patents, with no linear connection to the engineering success of the Space Race.
MacDonald also vividly portrays the personal lives of the men he highlights. He shows how stifling it can be to be married to someone pursuing a cause, whether scientific or political, at the expense of everything else. Their social circles take in belief in the spirit world, of the dark arts, of pulp science fiction, and proto-Scientology. It’s a sphere where everyone seemingly sleeps with everyone else’s partners. They casually throw away love lest it distract them from their work. Personal betrayals come both in the form of infidelities and confessions to FBI agents. It’s a long way from the usual desert loners and Teutonic staidness of most accounts of the dawn of the space age. And thank goodness for that.
I’m not sure MacDonald fully sells me on Malina’s place in rocket history. Malina’s work was important but his era was very brief, and soon surpassed by others. Yet I enjoyed MacDonald’s impressively-researched, enthusiastic attempt to convince me with a book that was both zanily entertaining and deeply sobering.
“The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA’s Visionary Leader George M. Low,” Richard Jurek, 2019.
Part of the “Outward Odyssey” book series where I made my own book debut, and written by a historian I have great admiration for, I was predisposed to like this book before I opened it.
Who was George Low? A talented, right-place, right-time engineer who ended up a key player in some of NASA’s biggest decisions in its golden age. And he passed away in 1984. There lies the fascination of this book, but also what limits its reach.
I dearly wish that Jurek had been able to write this book when Low was still alive. I am sure Jurek does also. It can be very tough to get to the heart of a person who’s no longer around to interview. Jurek has done everything possible to recreate the key NASA years of this important manager, including extensive dives into papers and archives, plus interviews with family and co-workers. In doing so, he probably gets us as close as anyone can to George Low’s character.
But when reading the first chapters, I was confused. We sprint through Low’s Vienna childhood at a dizzying pace. We’re only a dozen pages into the first chapter and Low’s already an adult living in the US and applying for a job at NACA, the precursor to NASA. Apparently this is a sign of Low’s character: he never talked about his early life, even with his family. Records are also apparently scant. It does mean the book title is somewhat unsuitable: in truth, this book is much more of a focus on a career than a life. I’m okay with that, because – what a career this man had.
The book doesn’t let up the fast pace for a while. We race through Low’s management progression, from an aeronautical engineer in a world of slow, methodical progress, to joining a fast-paced team in the new world of rocketry. The book bounces back and forth in time to bolster points, but sometimes loses its drive in doing so. Key space events rush by with little detail about them or Low’s involvement. The entire Gemini program, for example, gets only a few pages: the latter flights of the Mercury program, even less. Apparently Low kept few personal records of these years, so Jurek had much less to work with. Jurek, scrupulously, never forms conjectures, sticking to Low’s words. I got to understand George Low’s rise in management ranks, but I really wondered where the book was going.
Thankfully, the book does then slow to pay some detailed attention to Low’s work on setting a moon landing as a national goal. Quite unlike the general impression that President Kennedy’s decision to set this target came out of nowhere, Jurek shows that much of it was down to George Low’s careful planning. His strategic discussions with people of influence, laying the groundwork of what would be needed, and his intense belief in the goal meant that when the President needed to announce something showy, the foundation was there. Then came the hard part: flying to the moon within a decade.
Low proved himself to be a fiercely hard worker, managing fast, on-time meetings with high operational efficiency. A calm, determined man who did not waste a moment, he sounds to have been the perfect person for the intense early years of human spaceflight. As I kept reading, I noticed that the “ultimate engineer” of the title does not seem to be doing any actual engineering. Instead, he is making ever-higher-level management decisions that steer the space program in new directions. He’s overseeing an enormously complex engineering project while doing an even tougher job of keeping political support and funding as consistent as possible. There are wise lessons in here for managers in any career, which will stick with me long after reading this book.
We’re learning a lot about Low, but the nature of a careful, precise manager does not always make for a thrilling story. While personal papers and notes give some intriguing insight – such as verifying opinions others have stated about Low’s fellow NASA colleague George Mueller being a divisive and disruptive influence – at other times we are given long passages from speeches that Low gave. Speeches, by nature, often seek to inspire and summarize – they can be much more of a corporate, reassuring message than truly insightful. There’s a lot of telling and not showing, which is perhaps all that can be done for someone who passed away so long ago. I’m torn between admiration for Jurek for sticking judiciously to solid evidence, and a wish that he’d offer more personal analysis, even conjecture.
And then, ninety pages in, the book finally kicked into a new gear for me. After the tragic Apollo 1 fire that killed the crew, Low takes a leading role in spacecraft redesign. By all accounts, he was the perfect manager for that moment in history. And from here, the book flows with a new energy, as Low is center stage in pivotal space decisions. A large part of this seems to be because Low wrote and spoke a lot more about this era, so Jurek felt on much safer ground giving detail. The book blossoms. The risky decision to fly Apollo 8 to the moon ahead of schedule? Largely down to George Low. How the fallout from the Apollo 15 covers scandal may have scuttled Low’s chances at steering NASA into a glorious future? Original, and intriguing. Preparations for the first joint flight by America and the Soviet Union? Fascinating.
Best of all, Jurek expertly leads the reader through the strange paradox of NASA’s decline. Even as increasingly complex missions on the moon are taking place, public interest is evaporating, political enthusiasm is gone, and with them the chance of funding an ambitious future. Low is not the driver of this story, but he is an important element, for he is a pragmatist. He efficiently and humanely reduces NASA staff levels in the 1970s in the same wise manner he had expanded them in the 1960s. NASA’s years under President Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and its much-delayed space shuttle development are not often chronicled in books. This is probably because much of it is a sad tale of decline, of NASA’s wilderness years. For this reason, the book fills an important gap.
When George Low leaves NASA, and dies at the young age of 58, the book quickly wraps up. I’m left with mixed feelings. I feel like I just read a terrific story of NASA management from 1967 to 1975, which just happened to be centered on one key character. Those years take up most of the book, and are an invaluable insight into what happens to a government agency that achieves an enormous goal, then largely loses its reason to exist. I’m almost left wondering whether Jurek should have put his immense talent and impressive research into writing a history of that era in general, with Low as just one of many important characters. I think this book would have felt a lot stronger to me throughout had he done so.
But then, I think, we would not have had this insight into this remarkable character that so many of his colleagues lauded, but whom history has mostly overlooked. George Low wasn’t loud. He wasn’t brash. He didn’t cause huge fights. Instead he was something far more valuable, which never makes headlines: he was stolid.