Voyager Tales: Personal Views of the Grand Tour

by David W. Swift

In 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 journeyed to the outer planets, gathering information about Jupiter and Saturn, sending scientists on earth their first close-up photographs of Uranus and Neptune, and collecting a series of images of the sun and its planets. Twenty years later, "Voyager Tales" presents a collection of interviews from a cross section of the professionals involved in all aspects of the mission. This volume provides insights into the development of a major research project from the personal perspectives of the people who helped design, build and fly the two spacecrafts. Readers will use this book as a case study of a project that not only was highly successful, operating on time and on budget, but far surpassed its initial goals.

480 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1997

Reviews

[Bob Gustafson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange book. A sociologist, whose daughter happened to be a graduate assistant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, conducts interviews with administrators, engineers, scientists, and others who were involved with the Voyager Mission, or what morphed into the Voyager Mission. Then, rather than synthesize and analyze the interviews and bring in other information to write a book, he simply published the naked interviews.

Well, there was no bias, but it was a relatively boring read about something that should have been exciting. Perhaps, for an engineer or a scientist, there might be something vibrant that I didn't perceive.

This is also an instance where the reader has to bring a lot to the book. Fortunately, I read "Voyager" by Stephen J. Pyne. It was his notes that brought me to this book. Without it, I would have been in a desert.

Once I toughed it out through the first dozen interviews, it became somewhat entertaining, and I did learn something. Hence, three stars.