This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age

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This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 122 ratings · 8 reviews

This New Ocean is based on 175 interviews with Russian and American scientists and engineers; on archival documents, including formerly top-secret National Intelligence Estimates and spy satellite pictures; and on nearly three decades of reporting. The impressive result is this fascinating story--the first comprehensive account--of the space age. Here are the strategists a...more

Paperback, 752 pages

Published November 5th 1999 by Modern Library (first published 1998)

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Oct 24, 2012 Ilya rated it 4 of 5 stars

I wanted to read a few books on space exploration, and decided to first re-read this one-volume history of the space age. The ultimate weapon of the Cold War was the hydrogen bomb atop the ICBM. Half of it grew out of the American atomic bomb; half out of the German ballistic missile. The latter was styled one of the "vengeance weapons" that would turn the tide of World War II in Germany's favor; it didn't, and killed only about 5,000 Britons and others it hit, and about 10,000 concentration cam...more I wanted to read a few books on space exploration, and decided to first re-read this one-volume history of the space age. The ultimate weapon of the Cold War was the hydrogen bomb atop the ICBM. Half of it grew out of the American atomic bomb; half out of the German ballistic missile. The latter was styled one of the "vengeance weapons" that would turn the tide of World War II in Germany's favor; it didn't, and killed only about 5,000 Britons and others it hit, and about 10,000 concentration camp inmates who manufactured it. After the war, both the Americans and the Soviets were eager to get their hands on the weapon of the future. The underground factory that produced it was in the agreed-upon Soviet zone of occupation, but the Americans got there first, and wasted no time grabbing missile components and shipping them to the United States. Much less was left for the Soviet rocket scientists, but enough to make their mouths open. The top designers, headed by Dr. Wernher "I aim for the stars but sometimes I hit London" von Braun, surrendered to the Americans. As one engineer put it, "We despise the French; we are mortally afraid of the Soviets; we do not believe the British can afford us; so that leaves the Americans." The Soviets actually hired more German rocketeers, though not the top talent, squeezed all the knowledge from them and returned them home; the Americans allowed their Germans to stay for decades; one became the project director for the Saturn V rocket, the most powerful operational rocket ever built, after which it was "discovered" that he had a Nazi past; he was stripped of his US citizenship and deported to his native Germany.

Boosted by the Germans, both the Americans and the Soviets developed ever bigger missiles; the Soviet R-7 was the first that could fly across continents. It was used to launch the first artificial earth satellite, called Sputnik 1, in 1957, upstaging the Americans yet doing them an unexpected service. When an American U-2 spy plane overflew the Soviet Union, the Soviets were understandably furious at the Americans for violating their nation's airspace; yet they made their satellite overfly many countries without asking for their permission. Therefore, national sovereignty did not extend into space, and it was legal to launch a satellite that would photograph the terrain below, revealing the bombers, the submarines and the missile silos. As Burrows describes in greater detail in his book Deep Black, the United States took great advantage of it in the coming years. As President Lyndon Johnson put it in 1967, "we've spent thirty-five or forty billion dollars on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge we've gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost."

In 1960, Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy said, "We are in a strategic space race with the Russians, and we have been losing. The first man-made satellite to orbit the earth was named Sputnik. The first living creature in space was Laika. The first rocket to the Moon carried a red flag. The first photograph of the far side of the Moon was made with a Soviet camera. If a man orbits Earth this year his name will be Ivan." It was actually the next year, and the man's name was Yury Gagarin, but Kennedy had a point. So the United States decided to upstage the Soviets and put a man on the Moon. It was magnificent madness, possibly one of the greatest technological achievements of humanity done for no purpose other than American national prestige. It was not even a triumph of free enterprise: what was free about the government taking up to 0.7% of the GDP and giving it to contractors who were building rockets and spaceships? The Soviet moon program failed, and after putting several men on the Moon, the American one wound down. There was still the Space Shuttle, which was far more expensive and unreliable than older non-reusable space vehicles; other than launching satellites in a very expensive manner and resupplying space stations that were doing questionable research, it flew a Saudi prince as a favor to his nation, like the Soviets flew a Cuban and an East German cosmonaut as a favor to theirs.

At the same time, on lesser budgets than the high-profile manned missions, robotic spacecraft have been exploring the Solar System. Almost all we know about the other planets has come from these robots. Mariner 4 showed that there is no water on the surface of Mars; Viking that there are no organic compounds in Martian soil. An early Soviet Venus probe was designed to float in that planet's oceans, like in a Ray Bradbury story; we now know that the temperature of the planet's surface is 500 degrees centigrade. The Pioneers and the Voyagers explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and their moons. This was arguably a greater achievement than putting astronauts on the Moon.(less)

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Jun 04, 2012 Steve rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: accidents, cold-war-history, modern-history, nonfiction, organizations, ph-d-program-reading, popular-science, science-and-technology-studies, space

This book was somewhat frustrating and I struggled to finish it. What I liked about it was that it was comprehensive and included information on the American spy satellite program and the Soviet space program that was new for me. I think that one of the problems with many of the books on the space program that have been written in the last twenty years or so is that "small histories" are overrepresented. A great part of that is because the market has been flooded with memoirs of various astronau...more This book was somewhat frustrating and I struggled to finish it. What I liked about it was that it was comprehensive and included information on the American spy satellite program and the Soviet space program that was new for me. I think that one of the problems with many of the books on the space program that have been written in the last twenty years or so is that "small histories" are overrepresented. A great part of that is because the market has been flooded with memoirs of various astronauts (Jim Lovell, Mike Mullane) and important management personnel (such as Gene Kranz). That is fine as far as it goes, but this leaves a dearth of more general and comprehensive works of space history. Space history, like space itself, is a large topic and broad scale histories are useful. So, for that reason, I liked the wide coverage undertaken by this book.

The downside to this book is the terrible writing and composition. I have a friend - a former journalist - who graduated with a masters in journalism from the Medill journalism school at Northwestern, and he was and remains very harsh on what passes for journalistic writing. He is especially hard on those who uphold American journalistic writing as some type of paragon. This book makes me think of my friend and his critique. For instance, Burrows is far too fond of silly similes, which litter the book, and also far too fond of one word sentences such as "Wrong". But I could almost deal with that. What really galls me as a budding academic is Burrows' poor compositional skills. To me, the paradigmatic example comes on page 569 of the paperback version, where Burrows is engaged in a really rather interesting discussion of various studies and policy proposals undertaken in the late 1980's regarding how America should proceed in space in the wake of the Challenger tragedy. However, right in the middle of this discussion, Burrows puts in a paragraph about the Shuttle Discovery and the return to space, which is completely out of place and makes no sense in this location.

As another example, on page 579, Burrows begins his section on Voyager's Neptune encounter with "Thirty two days later..." without specifying what he means by this. The prior paragraph contains a quote by the British poet Robert Southey on the Battle of Blenheim, and one presumes that the Neptune encounter did not occur 32 days either after the battle of Blenheim (13 August 1704) or the publication of Southey's poem (in 1796). I suspect that he is connecting the Neptune encounter with then-Vice President Dan Quayle's inane comments on Mars on July 20, 1989 on page 576. But in the intervening three pages he mentions two Titan booster failures (in August of 1985 and April of 1986, respectively); a successful Titan launch in October of 1987; another Titan failure in September of 1988, and Discovery's successful return to space in September of 1988. So, with this much jumping around, it becomes very difficult to tell what "32 days later" refers to without some very close reading.

This is part and parcel of Burrows' general negligence to make it easy for the reader to follow dates by carefully attaching years to days and months. Admittedly, one does not have to always attach the year to a date after doing so for the first mention in a passage. But when an author jumps around in time as much as Burrows does, or after a paragraph or two, I personally prefer to mention the year again to prevent the tiresome exercise of having to search the text again for the date. And in several cases, Burrows simply never states the year. This is not a major flaw, but to me a very irritating one. It reveals a carelessness that is almost unconscionable. I don't mean to imply that he has fabricated the book or that he is wrong about major sections. Rather, it reveals a lack of care for the reader that is lacking in virtue.

But I shouldn't be too unfair to journalists, either. Gillian Tett, for instance, has impressed me with her account of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Tett is very clear and her timeline is as easy to follow as it can be for the fast moving and complex story she tells. She also does not indulge in "pop" phraseology or silly similes like Burrows does.

As one may tell, I really care about this sort of thing, a conviction hammered home by wading through hundreds of pages of bad undergraduate writing over several years. Writing is not easy, but just because it is not easy does not give us the warrant to fall down on the job. Rather, it introduces us to the duty to make ourselves understood and to as far as possible reduce the work of the reader by good composition. This is not to say that we should never write about topics that will inevitably challenge the reader's intellect. What I mean to stress is that the writing itself should not be the barrier. The clearer the writing, the more the reader can engage with challenging ideas and concepts in the writing. (less)

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Mar 11, 2008 George Bradford rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: apollo

Here is a sweeping historical account of humankind’s first race to leave the planet earth. While most "Apollo era" histories focus on the American experience, this book provides a parallel account of the Soviet Union's space program. (This chronicle is perhaps the best history of the USSR's space program I've read.) The resulting ebb and flow of the 'race' between the nations is captivating.

There are a numerous of facets to this story. Author William Burrows covers them all. The most prominent i...more Here is a sweeping historical account of humankind’s first race to leave the planet earth. While most "Apollo era" histories focus on the American experience, this book provides a parallel account of the Soviet Union's space program. (This chronicle is perhaps the best history of the USSR's space program I've read.) The resulting ebb and flow of the 'race' between the nations is captivating.

There are a numerous of facets to this story. Author William Burrows covers them all. The most prominent is the role of the military. Once convinced that a tool of warfare (the Missile) could be used to launch manmade satellites into space, the race was on. Militarism (disguised as Nationalism) and raw ego drove the competition. And the results were unprecedented in human history.

Burrows writes about the tragedies and triumphs in moving detail. These are often welcome respites from the avalanche of technical and historical detail that frequently bog down the narrative. (Those tedious passages are why I gave the book only three stars.)

William Burrows is one of the few writers to recognize and document the decline and, let's be honest, fall of the space faring nations' programs. Once the military lost interest, funding dried up and technical advancement ceased.

Unmanned deep space satellites and telescopes would contribute to humanity's knowledge of the worlds beyond our own. But human space travel receded. Redundant flights to space stations (SkyLab, Mir and the ISS) barely beyond the Earth's atmosphere were fatally unimaginative.

NASA transitioned from an aviator, engineer and scientist program to a manager and consultant program. As documented in this book, the 1986 Challenger disaster was inevitable. (The book doesn't cover the similar Columbia tragedy in 2002. But if you read this book you'll understand why it happened too.)

In spite of the disappointing "end" of the space race, Burrows remains optimistic. He presents this period in human space exploration as the foundation for future generations to build upon. One can only hope he's right.
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Aug 03, 2010 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, history

This book deals with more of the political side of space exploration rather than technical side. That said, it still is a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scene.

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Aug 20, 2009 Jonathanstray Stray rated it 5 of 5 stars

Space geek history porn. Especially good (and rare!) coverage of the Russians.

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Sep 20, 2007 Phil Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars

A solid piece of work recounting the history of what many call the First Space Age, a period largely composed of the Cold War space race and following "lost period" concluding the 20th century. Burrows writes this book not so much as an historical account, but as a foundation for what may come. One can clearly feel the author's measured enthusiasm for our future in space.

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Nov 29, 2011 Karl rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very good general history of the exploration of space that does an effective job of putting spaceflight (human and robotic) into the broader context of human history. Numerous asides to literature, film, and mythology help support Burrows' overall theme: space exploration is as much about culture as it is technology.

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May 17, 2010 Briapedia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-history, russian-soviet-history, space

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Shelves: non-fiction, the-high-frontier

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