Journey into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration

by Bruce C. Murray

Charting the USA's rise and decline as a leader of the space race, this text describes the last 30 years of space exploration and research, from early attempts to break free of Earth's atmosphere to the latest projects, such as Voyager II and NASA's flawed Space Shuttle programme.

Genres: Space, Nonfiction, Science, History

382 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1989

About the author

Bruce C. Murray was born November 30, 1931 in New York, NY. He is a professor emeritus of planetary science and geology at Caltech and was Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from April 1, 1976 to June 30, 1982.

He received his Ph.D. in geology from MIT in 1955 and was employed by Standard Oil of California, the USAF, and the United States Civil Service before joining Caltech in 1960. He became an associate professor in 1963, a full professor in 1969, and a professor emeritus in 2001.

With Carl Sagan and Louis Friedman, Murray founded the Planetary Society. He also served a term as its chair.

Murray was the recipient of the 1997 Carl Sagan Memorial Award. In 2004, Murray was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_C....

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

A coworker and I were discussing a few weeks ago (April 2011) how sad it is that NASA is retiring the Space Shuttle program. I mentioned that I thought it felt like giving up -- they say that the shuttles cost so much money that we don't have, and they're not getting enough in return, but what about the spirit of exploring? What about the spirit of discovery, and finding out more about our solar system? What about the spirit of going above and beyond (and literally, too) what we already know and where we are? What about the spirit of greatness?? Killing the Shuttle program is giving up on all of that adventurousness, and it's either saying "Meh, we don't care about learning new things," or "Eh, we'll let someone else do it." Ugh, it's just painful to me.

So reading this book, I feel that way even more. In the '60s and '70s, NASA and JPL were going hardcore on exploring other planets. I can't even imagine how amazing it must have been to be there then, finding out new details about the objects in the sky, and getting super-detailed photographs of the planets' and moons' surfaces. But then the White House's and NASA's focus turned from the robotic missions (Viking, Voyager, Gemini, etc.) that were gathering all of this data about our intergalactic neighbors to solely on the Space Shuttle, which apparently made the scientists at JPL feel like the White House and NASA were giving up. I say we go back to the old days of sending the machines out to find out as much as possible. Even if we're not going to colonize these places, don't we want to know more about them? What kind of atmosphere they have, what elements are present, whether there's water, etc.?

This book has some really impressive (black-and-white) photographs of other planets and objects in our solar system. The writing sometimes gets a bit technical (Oh, to have the mind of a scientist, like the author), but you still get the point, and the prose at times is beautiful and poetic.

Given that the book is from 1989, it might be a bit outdated, but Murray still gives some interesting ideas about space exploration for the future, especially strategies for going to Mars and a joint venture between the U.S. and Russia, as well as other countries. Plus, it's a good history of outer-space exploration.

[Tonya Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murray is a former Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. This book is part-memoir and part-history of the US’s journey through planetary exploration, which has mostly been performed by teams at JPL. Murray personally worked on many of the most well-known of these projects including Voyager and Mariner missions. It’s fascinating to get the inside view of the politics and budget wars that go into getting these projects approved and executed. Murray definitely bears a grudge for NASA’s iconic space shuttle. During its development in the 1970s and 1980s, NASA nearly zeroed out its planetary exploration budget to support cost overruns on the shuttle, which never delivered a planetary launch capability as promised. During that time, JPL struggled to stay open and turned to defense work to retain its employees. I found this particularly interesting now because JPL has been laying off its contractors and even employees recently in response to budget constraints across all of NASA and the federal government and because of uncertainty in its Mars Sample Return mission, which JPL was going to be leading. This book provides some great context for understanding what’s going on now in space policy and planetary science. Turns out NASA’s been planning a Mars sample return mission for decades, and they’re still struggling to get to an affordable and feasible plan. Nobody said that space is easy.