Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969–1989

by Jay Gallentine, Bobak Ferdowsi (Foreword)

Infinity Beckoned illuminates a critical period of space history when humans dared an expansive leap into the inner solar system. With an irreverent and engaging style, Jay Gallentine conveys the trials and triumphs of the people on the ground who conceived and engineered the missions that put robotic spacecraft on the heavenly bodies nearest our own. These dedicated space pioneers include such individuals as Soviet Russia’s director of planetary missions, who hated his job but kept at it for fifteen years, enduring a paranoid bureaucracy where even the copy machines were strictly regulated.

 

Based on numerous interviews, Gallentine delivers a rich variety of stories involving the men and women, American and Russian, responsible for such groundbreaking endeavors as the Mars Viking missions of the 1970s and the Soviet Venera flights to Venus in the 1980s. From the dreamers responsible for the Venus landing who discovered that dropping down through heavy clouds of sulfuric acid and 900-degree heat was best accomplished by surfing to the five-man teams puppeteering the Soviet moon rovers from a top-secret, off-the-map town without a name, the people who come to life in these pages persevered in often trying, thankless circumstances. Their legacy is our better understanding of our own planet and our place in the cosmos.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Space, Audiobook, American History

497 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Historian Jay Gallentine has a reputation for stripping away technobabble to focus on the human stories of space exploration. His casual and irreverent writing style renders a topic accessible and enjoyable, while retaining accuracy worthy of a reference tome.

Jay’s first book, "Ambassadors from Earth," detailing the turbulent early days of solar system exploration, received the 2009 Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature.

Jay's second book is "Infinity Beckoned." In the same lighthearted and non-technical fashion, readers will learn brand-new stories about such topics as looking for life on Mars with the 1976 Viking landers, and the top-secret town in Crimea used to control Soviet moon rovers.

Jay's third book, "Born to Explore," examines the life of JPL's John Casani in context with the problem-plagued Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Reviews

[Scott Kardel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Jay Gallentine's new book Infinity Beckoned. It is an engaging look at the people behind the search for life on the Viking missions to Mars, the unsung Soviet Lunokhod lunar rover drivers, the Venera mission to Venus and more. A great read!

[Alexander Dzhuly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Infinity Beckoned is a history of the robotic exploration of the solar system that focuses on the men and women that made it happen.

Jay Gallentine clearly put an amazing amount of effort into digging up the inside information and personal stories of what was an amazing time in history of exploration. Tales of the Soviet Lunokhod lunar rover drivers, the Viking missions' search for life and the Soviet Venera missions to Venus left the biggest impressions, but the book is a wonderful history of robotic exploration.

This is the second book in this series. Jay Gallentine's previous book Ambassadors From Earth looked at missions such as Sputnik, Explorer and the Voyager probes to the outer solar system, and Infinity Beckoned was even better.

[Shane Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a hot mess. It started with 1.5 hours (audiobook) on "detecting life" experiments on earth then jumped to Russian Luna 15 and Apollo 11 moon landing then back for 3 hours of Russian moon background. Skipping between US and Russian and different programs was very confusing. We spent over 2 hourson Luna 16 moon rover from its design/creation and the main engineers life from 1917 to 1960's (blah blah blah. don't give a shit if they designer liked soccer and enjoyed fish). The want back from 1970-71 Luna 16 back to Apollo (not sure why) then jumped to Vera Venus missing the forward to Voyager then backward to Mars Viking. I quit 50% through. that's 8 hours. So I felt I gave it a good shot.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read anything of substance about the Russian side of the story so it was extremely interesting to me. Impressed by how the author tracked down so many people responsible. I really disliked the informal tone the book is written in. It's OK to quote interviewees in natural language but adding it to normal prose is forced and plain annoying.

[Ronald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent storytelling, if a bit long and short of technical material. Was looking more for a technical case study. Nice to have included the soviet perspective as well.

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what I make of this book, which tries to cover a very technical topic in a very colloquial and pop writing style; which I wound up finding a little annoying. Still, in examining the unmanned American & Russian planetary missions of the time, the overarching theme might be that for all the effort the results remain rather ambiguous, and that there has not been enough follow-up research. To be blunt, the Viking Mars landers were probably over-ambitious and engineered to ask the wrong questions, whereas the Soviet efforts were undercut by a lagging electronics & computer base on one hand, and the irrationalities of the Soviet system on the other; bureaucratic friction is the soul of this story. There is no doubt though that the author has put forth a great deal of journalistic effort into this book, and he deserves respect on that basis.

Actual rating: 3.5.

Originally written: March 4, 2017.