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The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity
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The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity
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by Wyn Wachhorst and Buzz Aldrin
Sales Rank : 1695121
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Hardcover: 225 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition May 2, 2000
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465090575
ISBN-13: 978-0465090570
Product Dimensions:
7.3 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
Product Review
Will we walk on distant planets? Terrestrial problems may have regained center stage in our awareness, but the mythic and poetic possibilities unearthed by the space programs of the 20th century have changed us forever. Historian Wyn Wachhorst captures the essence of our birth as an interstellar species in The Dream of Spaceflight, a collection of five essays spanning 500 years of scientific and technological achievement. The marriage of curiosity and hard work that drove heroes like Johannes Kepler, Wernher von Braun, and the Apollo astronauts (one of whom, Buzz Aldrin, wrote the foreword to this collection) to conceive, develop, and implement the knowledge and machinery of space travel comes alive in Wachhorst's evocative prose. The subtitle of the second piece, "Nostalgia for a Bygone Future," speaks volumes about the thoughtfulness and creative energy the author devotes to his craft. Wachhorst knows why we cared so deeply about the space program during its heroic phase. And he explains our curious ambivalence now that human involvement is restricted to mission control and orbital flights perceived as not much different from extended plane rides. The reader comes away from The Dream of Spaceflight freshly inspired--if a few U.S. senators read this, NASA will get all the funding it needs. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
"Spaceflight is a spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity." Wachhorst's brief, lyrical essays trace an enraptured and sometimes informative triad of historical trajectories; each of his five chapters covers space travel as idea and imagination (a strand in the history of science fiction); space travel as scientific accomplishment (part of the history of technology); and space travel as a motif in Wachhorst's own life and mind (a kind of autobiography). Moving from the 1500s to the year 2000, Wachhorst covers the planetary voyages of 17th-century proto-SF; the cash-strapped early rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard; 1940s architect and artist Chesley Bonnestell, who painted vivid, realistic space flights and planetary surfaces; the film Destination Moon, on which Bonnestell collaborated with producer George Pal and Robert A. Heinlein; and, for most of the book's last half, the space program itself. At the time, the Apollo program met with both admiration and deprecation. Wachhorst wants to exult it anew, and his final agenda is philosophical and polemical, as well as literary. He believes that human beings should, can and will travel back to the planets or the stars in order to realize our higher nature, and that to abandon space travel would represent an ultimate "failure of nerve." Wachhorst's prose can be as wondrously compact as a moon rockAor as glowingly gaseous as the Crab Nebula; readers who already share his enthusiasms may wish he had given more space to facts, descriptions and arguments, while those who remain of two minds about the final frontier may learn moreAand find more sheer wonderAin Carl Sagan's writings. Agents, Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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