The Voyage of Mae Jemison (Social Studies Emergent Readers)

Book Description

In order to reflect the increasing importance and interest of the microsatellites in high technology and scientific applications in space, the Colloquium on Microsatellites as Research Tools was organized to promote its usage and technology development and to foster the international cooperation, especially in the area of the Asia pacific region.

Attended by 150 participants from 18 countries the colloquium was organized into five major themes: regional development, lessons learned, innovations, scientific applications, and education. A special session was organized as well by the organizing committee and supported by the National Space Program Office to present its development of the Taiwan's satellite program and the current status of ROCSAT-1 which is scheduled to be launched at the beginning of 1999.

Two main conclusions were drawn from the material presented: microsatellite in general is a very good means for doing space research and technology development, and a suitable vehicle to promote international collaborations.

Average customer rating:

My Most-Used Astronautics Reference Book

A great book for understanding spacecraft systems.

Good, but not Great

Good and bad

Outstanding inclusive text on satellites

Space Mission Analysis and Design, 3rd edition (Space Technology Library) (Space Technology Library)

Manufacturer: Microcosm Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Aeronautics & Astronautics | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books
Look Inside Science Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Science | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Spacecraft Systems Engineering 3rd Edition

Fundamentals of Astrodynamics

Understanding Space

Space Vehicle Design (Aiaa Education Series)

The Space Environment: Implications for Spacecraft Design

ASIN: 1881883108

Book Description

This practical handbook for Space Mission Engineering draws on leading aerospace experts to carry readers through mission design, from orbit selection to ground ops. SMAD III updates the technology, provides greater emphasis on small spacecraft design and the cost-reduction process, and includes more detail on multi-satellite manufacturing, space computers, payload design and autonomous systems.

Customer Reviews:

My Most-Used Astronautics Reference Book.......2007-03-11

Over 5 years as an aerospace engineer at Boeing and Lockheed Martin, I have used this book far more than any other for astronautics. This is not only an excellent reference, but a good textbook, in fact the only textbook required for my entire Master's degree. Many engineers simply say "look at Wertz" to find whatever answers you need.

A great book for understanding spacecraft systems........2007-01-23

This is essential reading for anyone who works in the field of spacecraft hardware regardless if it is at the component level or the spacecraft level. This book adequately presents an overview of each of the subsystems that comprise a spacecraft. Indeed much of these systems are similar for payloads as well just in a scaled down version. Information is provided in such a way as to efficiently teach how these subsystems interact with each other as well as how the requirements flow down from the top mission or science level requirements into the detailed functional and performance requirements. This book captures the interrelation of the programmatic requirements of budgets and schedules in helping define what technical solutions are implemented for the aforementioned mission or science requirements.

This book will help all spacecraft mangers get a top level view of various subsystems such that he or she can make adequate trade studies. This book will help the systems engineer communicate requirements across the subsystem interfaces. This book will help the subsystem and component level engineers understand how the interfaces of their work carry over throughout the spacecraft as well as to understand the inputs that go into their specific area.

Good, but not Great.......2006-05-03

This book is the third edition of the author's previous work and is the collective writings from dozens of engineers who specialize in spacecraft systems design, space mission definition and operations and testing as well as a variety of other topics. While this book provides an excellent general overview of a variety of topics and the basics for designing and developing a space mission, more specialized materials are needed to develop specialized spacecraft systems, such as Guidance and Navigation. It is important to note that this book is geared to unmanned satellites and space probes and there is little material related to manned spaceflight.

As someone who has worked in the aerospace industry for almost two decades, I found the book slightly lacking in several areas. In addition to the previously noted areas, I found that some of the contributing authors focused primarily their specific projects. Even with these minor faults, this book provides the reader or developer of space missions, with a comprehensive overview of all the pieces that are needed to develop a spacecraft for a space mission.

Finally, it should be noted that this book is highly technical and not geared towards the casual reader who is interested general spaceflight.

Good and bad.......2001-06-20

I teach a Space Systems Engineering class and have used this book as a class text. I've found it to be both good and bad.

On the good side, SMAD provides a very good overview of the satellite and mission design process. It's full of realistic and experience-based design information, and useful data and algorithms for sizing and costing.

Especially useful are the "Process" tables, which map out the design process into several distinct steps.

The book has its downsides, though.

The various authors are usually far too verbose -- their points are often lost in the blizzard of words. The length of the book could be profitably cut by at least 100 pages.

Also, the authors often come to the table with a distinct agenda, which leads them to say things which are not necessarily accurate. (See, e.g., Wertz's diatribes on autonomous orbit determination and maneuver planning -- the latter is almost a veiled advertisement for a software product being sold by Wertz's company.) The effect is to cut off consideration of other valid options.

Finally, the book can be extremely uneven in the level of technical knowledge required. For example, Chapter 9 (Payload Design) presupposes a tremendous amount of detailed knowledge of, say, optical payloads, to the effect that: if you knew all of the stuff required, you wouldn't need SMAD; and if you don't know the stuff, SMAD won't help you.

Despite these problems, it is still a very good and useful book -- you just have to be careful sometimes in how you use it.

Outstanding inclusive text on satellites.......1999-10-22

This is an outstanding text covering all aspects of space missions and satellites. Orbital geometries, payload design, spacecraft design, subsystems, communications, operations, propulsion, launch systems, reliability. You name it, it's covered. It has become a valuable and indispensable resource in my personal library!

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

Average customer rating:

Scientific progress is never cut and dried
physics from many angles
A mixed bag
The Endless Quest Continues
Outstanding piece of writing, A must-read for any science enthusiast.

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Lee Smolin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

20th Century | World | History | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

History of Science | History & Philosophy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Physics | Science | Subjects | Books

Look Inside History Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Science Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0618551050

Book Description

In this groundbreaking book, the renowned theoretical physicist Lee Smolin argues that physics—the basis for all other science—has lost its way. The problem is string theory, an ambitious attempt to formulate "a theory of everything" that explains all the forces and particles of nature and how the universe came to be. With its exotic new particles and parallel universes, string theory has captured the public"s imagination and seduced many physicists. But as Smolin reveals, there"s a deep flaw in the theory: no part of it has been proven, and no one knows how to prove it. As a scientific theory, it has been a colossal failure. And because it has soaked up the lion's share of funding, attracted some of the best minds, and penalized young physicists for pursuing other avenues, it is dragging the rest of physics down with it. With clarity, passion, and authority, Smolin charts the rise and fall of string theory and takes a fascinating look at what will replace it. A group of young theorists has begun to develop exciting new ideas that are, unlike string theory, testable. Smolin tells us who and what to watch for in the coming years and how we can find the next Einstein. This is a wake-up call, and Lee Smolin—a former string theorist himself— is the perfect person to deliver it.

Customer Reviews:

Scientific progress is never cut and dried.......2007-10-08

Lee Smolin presents a harsh critique of the last 30 years in theoretical physics, written by one of its practitioners. He makes the excellent point that science is a human activity like anything else. Progress is always hard to predict; scientists can and do get caught up in dead ends. Smolin thinks string theory is one such dead end, and makes a good case for it.

I think that, if anything, Smolin is a little too gentle on the field. The development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs left a tremendous impression that big money put into physics would bring big results. In recent years that hasn't happened. There are so many unanswered questions out there in science, so many important fields where solutions are desperately needed. When I consider the construction and operation of particle accelerators and other high-tech equipment, I can't help but think of the huge cost. The same amount of cash invested elsewhere might have brought much more in the way of useful results.

I am the mother of a 10-year-old boy attending public school. His instruction sometimes seems to me like a mishmash of well-meaning educational reforms that have been implemented with little or no testing to see if they worked or not. I am frankly disgusted by the quality of most research in the area of education--sample sizes too small, no proper controls, subjects followed for too short a time, etc. The cost of operating a single particle accelerator for six weeks probably exceeds all the funding for educational research around the world for the entire year. Yet which has the most potential for making major progress? Maybe it's time to back off on funding big physics projects for a while.

I would also like to point out that the building and use of instrumentation for high-energy physics is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. The future supply of such fuels is by no means guaranteed. The peak oil problem appears to be largely ignored by high-energy physicists today, but has the potential to significantly affect their ability to conduct experiments.

I really enjoyed Smolin's chapters on looking for seers rather than technicians in science. I especially liked his description of how unconventional scientists have built a career without a university job. Smolin points out that a typical professor spends a majority of his week on teaching, grant proposals, administrative tasks, and the like, leaving a surprisingly small amount of time available for actual research. Having a day job outside the field is not as big a hurdle as it might seem.

I tend to agree with Smolin that the big advances of the future are likely to come from completely unexpected directions. I can't wait to see what they are.

physics from many angles.......2007-10-05

This book provided several discussions pf physics and quantum theory. its good because the author speaks of the history the the originators of physics theory and the current champions of thought.

A mixed bag.......2007-10-04

At the moment, string theory appears to have many (possibly an infinite number) of "metastable vacua", each of which would allow for a universe with its own laws of physics. (For a brief, comic, yet essentially correct summary of the history of this idea, see Peter Shor's review here. For those who don't know, Shor is a celebrated quantum-information theorist.) According to the (far from established) inflationary model of cosmology, there is a vast collection of universes (the "multiverse") with diverse laws of physics. Which universe we find ourselves in is a matter of random selection, but of course we must be in a "biofriendly" universe, one whose laws of physics allow for the appearance of intelligent life.

The core argument of this book is presented on page 164-165 (US hardcover edition), where Smolin writes, "when it comes to the biofriendliness of our universe, we have at least three possibilities:

"1. Ours is one of a vast collection of universes with random laws.

"2. There was an intelligent designer.

"3. There is a so-far-unknown mechanism that will both explain the biofriendliness of our universe and make testable predictions by which it can be confirmed or falsified.

"Given that the first two possibilities are untestable in principle, it is most rational to hold out for the third possibility. Indeed, that is the only possibility we should consider as scientists, because accepting either of the first two would mean the end of our field."

I find this to be an astonishing argument. First of all, I don't know what "most rational" is supposed to mean. More importantly, to reject a scientific hypothesis for purely personal reasons (it "would mean the end of our field") is at best novel, and at worst absurd.

Very few string theorists are happy that #1 seems, at this point, to be the most likely outcome of string theory, and many hope that #3 will somehow eventually emerge. But to throw out the whole framework, simply because we don't like the result, cannot be said to be a scientific attitude.

One thing you won't learn in this book (unless you read it very carefully, and between the lines) is that the other approaches to quantum gravity advocated by Smolin have not come any closer to predicting specific experimental results than string theory has. Smolin talks about possible violations of special relativity, but these are not (as he admits on page 237) a definite prediction of loop quantum gravity. He has said (on Peter Woit's blog) that any quantum field theory in any number of dimensions is compatible with loop quantum gravity. If true, this would make loop quantum gravity even less capable than string theory of picking out our particular laws of physics.

Smolin also discusses issues of sociology in physics. On page 335-336, he asserts that the all the truly negative characterizations of job candidates that he has ever heard have had a component of racism and/or sexism. I am on the faculty of the physics department of a research university, and I can only say that my experience has been entirely different. I have simply never heard a racist or sexist denigration of one scientist by another, nor have I ever felt that anyone was being evaluated by criteria other than merit. I think that there are definitely issues of culture and how we can construct scientific communities that have broader appeal, and that there are physicists who are not as sensitive to these issues as they might be, but I cannot accept Smolin's claim that the relatively small percentage of women and blacks in physics is due to "blatant prejudice".

Finally, Smolin discusses the issues of "seers" vs "craftspeople" in science, and argues that we should be supporting more "seers". Among the existing seers, he lists some (such as Roger Penrose and Gerard 't Hooft) who made their reputations primarily as craftspeople ('t Hooft received the Nobel Prize for his work on the renormalization of gauge theories, and Penrose did celebrated work on the singularity theorems of general relativity). Their record as seers has been less successful; none of their recent ideas on modifications of quantum mechanics have panned out as yet. Smolin laments the fact that more attention is not paid to these forays into alternatives to quantum mechanics. But 't Hooft and Penrose do not agree on what modifications are needed. Other seers identified by Smolin propose violations of special relativity, rather than (or in addition to) violations of quantum mechanics. Perhaps this is all deep thought, but there is little to decide, at this point, which if any of these avenues should be pursued. Most physicists have therefore sensibly adopted a "wait and see" attitude.

Even if we accept Smolin's argument that we need new seers, how are we to find them? Smolin writes (page 353) that in order to discover "the visionaries who ignore the mainstream and follow their own ambitious programs", we should "find at least one accomplished person in the candidate's field who is deeply excited about what the candidate is trying to do". So, the candidate's program had better not be *too* far off the mainstream; there has to be at least one "accomplished person" who is "deeply excited" about it. But if one deeply excited professional is good, wouldn't more be better? Wouldn't that up the odds that the program was, indeed, worthwhile? Oh wait, that would be just what we have now ... a system where there is constant debate, emergent consensus on the most promising approaches, and distribution of research funds primarily (but by no means exclusively!) to those approaches that appear, in the consensus view, to be most promising. To paraphrase Winston Churchill on democracy, this system for distributing funds for science may be the worst ever devised, except for all the others.

So, should you buy the book? I feel that it gives a distorted picture, by emphasizing the weak points of string theory while ignoring the (many more, in my view) weak points of the alternatives. It seems to me that the essence of the book's argument against string theory is captured by the excerpts above, and by Shor's review. Then there is a lot of discussion of groupthink in scientific culture. For me, it doesn't add up to an appealing package, but your mileage may vary.

The Endless Quest Continues .......2007-10-04

I like Lee Smolin and this is a good exposition of the current quandary in Physics. When the mathematicians "hijacked" physics in the 1920's, they created ever-so elegant formulas and abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction. "Just give me a formula!" was their mantra, and what it all really "means" was not their concern. This is the essence of Bohr's position (no pun intended), and Einstein was not able to answer, even though he knew something was missing.

String theory has many intriguing ideas, and it's supporters should not be easily dismissed. Again and again, we come back to the basic question...particle or wave? Wavicle? Partiwave? String?

Outstanding piece of writing, A must-read for any science enthusiast........2007-09-22

I found this book to be superbly written and full of fascinating insights. I really loved reading it. Many of the longer reviews here do a great job of reviewing the content of the book, so I'll stick to offering my opinion.

I will no doubt read this book again in the future as much of the content was way over my head. However, as with any great book on any subject, this did not prevent me from thoroughly enjoying it and learning a lot. What makes it so great is that each time I read it I will learn more.

I want to thank Lee Smolin for putting the current state of his field in some perspective. I highly, highly recommend this book!

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918

Average customer rating:

Encore!
A masterwork of the supeficial
An Exciting Approach to the Study of Cultural History
the book is a superb general cultural history of the period.

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
Stephen Kern
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

Western | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

Civilization & Culture | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

General | Psychology & Counseling | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

History of Technology | Technology | Science | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Health Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside History Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Nonfiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Science Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0674179730

Book Description

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION

From about 1880 to World War I, sweeping changes in technology and culture created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. Stephen Kern writes about the onrush of technics that reshaped life concretely--telephone, electric lighting, steamship, skyscraper, bicycle, cinema, plane, x-ray, machine gun-and the cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought--the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry, relativity, and the introduction of world standard time.

Kern interprets this generation's revolutionized sense of past, present, and future, and of form, distance, and direction. This overview includes such figures as Proust Joyce, Mann, Wells, Gertrude Stein, Strindberg, Freud, Husserl, Apollinaire, Conrad, Picasso, and Einstein, as well as diverse sources of popular culture drawn from journals, newspapers, and magazines. It also treats new developments in personal and social relations including scientific management, assembly lines, urbanism, imperialism, and trench warfare.

While exploring transformed spatial-temporal dimensions, the book focuses on the way new sensibilities subverted traditional values. Kern identifies a broad leveling of cultural hierarchies such as the Cubist breakdown of the conventional distinction between the prominent subject and the framing background, and he argues that these levelings parallel the challenge to aristocratic society, the rise of democracy, and the "death of God." This entire reworking of time and space is shown finally to have influenced the conduct of diplomacy during the crisis of July 1914 and to have structured the "Cubist war" that followed.

Customer Reviews:

Encore!.......2004-11-13

The Culture of Time and Space was a pioneering book when it first came out and it is wonderful to see how elegantly it has aged. These connections among the sciences and the arts, and among the arts themselves, were mostly new when Kern first published this essay, and are still too rarely made, even those between literature and painting that we find discreetly suggested by the cover of almost every serious book these days. Best of all, those relationships really exist. The connection between Picasso's cubist representation of space (beginning in 1907) and Einstein's four-dimensional representation of space-time (which depends on the Relativity paper of 1905 and an insight about gravity Einstein had in 1907) is entirely real. This is history, not an "alternative reading," and it is intellectual/cultural history at its best. For me it was the inspiration to finish writing a book of my own, and it's a pleasure to welcome it back to print.

A masterwork of the supeficial.......2004-10-23

Stephen Kern read a lot, writing his book. His study is a conglomerate of the most important authors, sociologists and philosophers focusing on the shift of time and space concepts in modern Europe. The broadness of his knowledge is the lack of his book, because it is nothing else than a masterwork of the superficial. Combine a little bit of time-philosophy in the novels of Proust, a little bit of brainstorming (Molly Bloom) in Joyce, combined with Einstein, James, Husserl (!), Bergson, Ibsen, etc. and you have a good pseudo-cultural-philosophic consommé. The book is mixture of articles you find in encyclopedias. I am very disappointed, especially with Harvard University Press.

An Exciting Approach to the Study of Cultural History.......2001-09-24

Stephen Kern conducts an innovative examination of the way in which new perceptions of time and space influenced ideas, philosophies, art forms, behavior, politics, and foreign relations. Kern is able to connect such seemingly unrelated topics as the sinking of the RMS Titanic and Friedrich Nietzche's evaluation of the present (an approach he calls "conceptual distance") to create a better understanding of the changing attitudes concerning time and space at the turn of the twentieth century. As Kern points out, the study of such an array of diverse cultural elements in terms of temporal and spatial experiences is essential because time and space are universal. All peoples experience time and space. Ultimately, he explains how the changing notions of time and space culminated in the diplomatic breakdown which led to the First World War.

This study is very intriguing, but there are weaknesses in his many conclusions. On the cinema, for example, certainly, it was exciting for viewers to see, for the first time, a man running backwards on the screen; however, it is difficult to take from such experiences the assertion that viewers changed their attitudes regarding time outside the theatre. Although some memebers of the audience indeed ducked at the sight of an oncoming locomotive on the screen, one must assume that viewers were able to distinguish between what they saw in the theatres and their experiences in real life. More convincing is Kern's argument that the cinema promoted a sense of temporal world unity (displaying a global sense of time through newsreels, etc.).

His main argument regarding the July crisis is also a little weak. Briefly, Kerns maintains that the preoccupation with speed (especially with the fast, impersonal telegraph) caused diplomacy to fail due to rapid, ill-considered responses to events (the assassiantion of Archduke Ferdinand) and the short time limit given to the Serbian government to respond to Austria's ultimatum. Certainly there were failures in diplomacy before the telegraph. Moreover, it could be argued that the telegraph had the potential of making accidental conflicts less likely than before because it allowed for immediate decisions to be made by governments at home rather than by military officers and soldiers abroad (i.e. the Cuban Missile Crisis, although this was--of course--outside of Kern's period of study). It is also a little hard to swallow that the wonderful technological, philosophical, cultural advances and changes of this period were steering the world to an irreversible path of destruction.

Despite these weaknesses, this work is a must have for students of this period because it covers such a broad range of topics and links them into an intriguing and ambitious theory. It really prompted me to think about this period (my favorite period of history) with a very broad brush.

the book is a superb general cultural history of the period........1998-10-22

The book is a superb general cultural history of the turn of the century period that relates developments in culture and society to new technologies of transportation and communication. He divides the period into subtopics of time and space, as the major chapters focus on changing ways people experienced past, present, future, speed, form, distance, and direction. Two concluding chapters examine how the changing experiences and ideas about time and space in the prewar period shaped World War I--first a chapter on "The Temporality of the July Crisis" and a final chapter, "The Cubist War." The overall aregument is that these new technologies forced a new set of values on the Western world, one which Kern calls a rehierarchization of earlier cultural forms. Kern sees these new technologies as moving society in the direction of greater democracy, a leveling of older aristocratic hegemony, and a secularization of life and thought.

Average customer rating:

God Made Outer Space

God Made Outer Space
Heno, Jr. Head
Manufacturer: Standard Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

ASIN: 0784717028

Customer Reviews:

God Made Outer Space.......2000-07-30

My children love this book. It is very informative, yet simple. I like that God is given the glory for the creation of space and all that is in it. It talks about the different sizes and colors of stars(including the sun), as well as their varying temperatures. It discusses galaxies, constellations, comets, moons, asteroids, and meteors. It explains what a planet is and the solar system. In the end it encourages children to go to the bible to find out more about God's creation. We will look for more of these books as a way to introduce our children to science from a christian perspective.

Echoes Among the Stars: A Short History of the U.S. Space Program

Average customer rating:

A Concise History of the Early US Space Program
Not the Space Program, Rather Mecury, Gemini and Apollo
History of the space program told with dignity and grace
Echoes: A Sensitive, Vivid Look at the U.S. in Space

Echoes Among the Stars: A Short History of the U.S. Space Program
Patrick J. Walsh
Manufacturer: M.E. Sharpe
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Aeronautics & Astronautics | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books

Astrophysics & Space Science | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Science | Subjects | Books

History of Technology | Technology | Science | Subjects | Books

Customer Reviews:

A Concise History of the Early US Space Program.......2002-04-18

First of all, let me state that the subtitle of this book should really be something like, "A Short History of the Manned US Space Program up to 1975," since there is very little information on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs and almost nothing on unmanned missions. About half of the book concentrates on the Apollo program. On the flip side, there are some nice discussions on the competing Russian programs. I think a good rating for this book should be 3 stars if you're a space nut and know a lot about the space program and 5 stars if you're a novice space nut. Regardless of your level of space knowledge you'll find this a well written and easy to read book.

The book opens with a small chapter on the early unmanned space race to place the first satellites in Earth Orbit. The book then movies into the Mercury and Gemini programs and presents the competing Russian projects. The section on the Gemini program presents a good summary of each mission, its problems and accomplishments and shows how this program proved many of the concepts, like docking, needed to make Apollo the success that it was.

The next few sections of the book cover the Apollo missions to the moon and the various steps of the program. The first chapter covers the Apollo 1 fire, the subsequent investigation and changes made to the vehicle. I found this chapter especially refreshing since it avoided the gruesome details of the astronauts' deaths which is not always the case with some books on the space race. The next section covers the precursor missions, Apollos 7-10, which led up the first moon landing which, of course, receives its own chapter. The next two chapters cover Apollo 12 - 17 and provide some very good summaries of these missions. It is interesting to note that during these times, the comparative Russian manned space program is almost at a complete standstill.

After the moon landing chapters, about half of the book, the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project are discussed. I found the section on Skylab extremely disappointing. Here was a program that more than doubled US spaceflight time and which conducted many important micro-gravity related experiments, yet it only receives six page of text, less than half that of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project chapter. The final chapter of the book covers the last 27 years of manned flight and only examines the most important missions. It just seems that the author ran of steam covering everything that happened after the moon landings took place.

Not the Space Program, Rather Mecury, Gemini and Apollo.......2001-10-31

I was greatly disappointed in this book. It is not about the space program, but rather about the MANNED space program: primarily Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. There is still a need for a short overall appreciation of the space program. Planetary exploration and space astronomy are missing, as are the applications: communications, weather, and remote sensing. T.A. Heppenheimer's recent book may be the best general work on space.

History of the space program told with dignity and grace.......2000-12-11

Echoes Among the Stars by Patrick J. Walsh is not only a concise lesson in the history of the U.S. Space Program, but also a lyrical tribute to man's quest for knowledge. Walsh's book methodically and elegantly recalls the missions that led up to Neil Armstrong's first captivating step on the moon, fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's vision, and continues to trace the development of the Space Program through the voyages of the space shuttles.

Walsh imparts the episodes that inform America's modern psyche with the adventuresome spirit with which they were undertaken. I keenly felt the valor of the astronauts. Creating a parallel between the space programs of the USSR and the United States, Walsh demonstrates how the competition between the programs led to "a handshake across the heavens." By placing the events of the Space Program within the political and social context of the United States, the magnitude of NASA's accomplishments becomes even more striking. The useful chronology at the end of the book is a wonderful, succinct reference of achievements and tragedies sustained by both the Soviet and American space programs alongside political and social events.

In a nation that seems to be consuming itself with political angst, Echoes reminds the reader of the powerful patriotism that has made the United States great. Passages relaying the greatest accomplishments of the astronauts-John Glenn's first earth orbit, Ed White's first American spacewalk, Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov's handshake-as well as the greatest tragedies-the losses of the Apollo I and Challenger crews-are treated with accomplished storytelling skills that left me filled with emotion. A well-crafted history, Echoes is also a rarity-a truly graceful narrative. Echoes belongs on every well-appointed book shelf in the United States.

Echoes: A Sensitive, Vivid Look at the U.S. in Space.......2000-04-05

As I began reading "Echoes Among the Stars," I was immediately taken with Walsh's prose-like style. His poetic descriptions of man's fascination with the moon and John Glenn's return to space make this book thoroughly enjoyable and very readable. It is written so smoothly and with such emotion that I actually forgot I was reading a nonfiction, historical study. Walsh's love and knowledge of the subject make it easy to understand the outer space passions of such famous figures as Stephen Hawking and Tom Hanks. His thoughtful, storytelling-style will help readers such as myself not only visualize Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's famous journey, but feel what they and the country felt and experienced when they took that fateful stroll on the cratered moon surface.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books