Robotic Exploration of the Solar System: Part I: The Golden Age 1957-1982

by Paolo Ulivi, David M. Harland

This fascinating book is a must-have text for space enthusiasts with an engineering bent. It is a detailed history of unmanned missions that have explored our solar system. The subject is treated wherever possible from an engineering and scientific standpoint and includes technical descriptions of the spacecraft, their mission designs and their instrumentations. Scientific results are discussed in depth, together with details of mission management. The book is fantastically comprehensive, covering missions and results from the 1950s right up to the present day. Some of the latest missions and their results appear in a popular science book for the first time.

Genres: Space, Nonfiction, Science

600 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Avi]

Amazing comprehensive overview of the early years of space exploration from a management, technical and historical perspective. More technical than your standard pop-science book but not too technical so as to render it inaccessible. A must-read for anyone interested in Space

[Tanwen Cooper]

A thorough look at the first 25 years of the Space Age. Whatever robotic mission you want to learn about in this era will be in this book in a reasonable amount of detail making this a great book to dip into. However, if you do that it can be a bit confusing. It jumps between missions, agencies and nomenclature without much warning making it a bit hard to work out where you are.

[Arnold]

Awesomely comprehensive book about early space probes to the planets, with each mission, its development, and its results recounted in intense detail. The focus here is information rather than narrative, so in places this can get pretty dry—but to me, for a book like this, that’s 100% fine.

[Dan Zarfati]

Although it is a bit dry to read, the amount of information is considerable, and it is worthwile.