Spacecraft: 100 Iconic Rockets, Shuttles, and Satellites That

Well, looks like it's time for me to be the one dissenting voice again. In all fairness, I enjoyed the concept of this book, and many of the illustrations are quite nice. The entries that don't have glaring errors are quite enjoyable to read, and while I didn't agree that every single flown variation of Soyuz deserved to be included, the book does include a large number of fascinating spacecraft that aren't American or Russian.Unfortunately, it seems like very little work was done to properly edit or fact check this book before publication. I got so frustrated reading it I started putting together a list of some of the more obvious errors and editing mistakes that jumped out:-The Gemini's retrograde and equipment sections mislabeled as the "mission module" and "service module."-S-IVB SECO mislabeled as "SVIB MECO."-The Apollo CM is described as being "10.6 inches" long and weighing "32,390 pounds," almost three times more than the actual figure.-The combined Apollo spacecraft is described as weighing 68,600 pounds, 30,000 pounds less than reality.-Apollo 7 is described as having "practiced withdrawing the lunar module from the Saturn V shroud." The mission was launched on a Saturn IB and didn't carry an LM.-The diameter of the Soyuz 7K-M is given as "8.9 inches."-The X-15's landing speed is given as 109 km/h, less than a third of what it was in reality.-The Skylab 3 thruster leak was in the Service Module, not the Command Module as described.-Nixon is described as the first president to visit the USSR, ignoring Franklin Roosevelt and the Yalta conference of 1945.-The weight of the Apollo/ASTP spacecraft listed as "23,570 meters."-Early thermonuclear weapons are described as being lighter than the nuclear warheads of the early 50s. The opposite was actually true.-The thrust of both stages of the Saturn IB and the first stage of the Saturn V is given in kilometers.-Proton is described as the Soviet Union's "response to the Saturn V," although it could only carry about one-sixth of the payload to LEO.-Jupiter is described as being "779 kilometers" from Earth.-The height of the combined space shuttle stack is given as 154 feet, 30 feet shorter than it actually was.-Challenger is described as being destroyed by an "explosion of massive power," rather than by a violent aerodynamic breakup.-Space Shuttle SRB ignition is described as occurring 6.6 seconds before liftoff. They actually ignited at T-0.-An LH2/LO2 mixture ratio of 6:1 is given for the SSMEs; the actual ratio was six pounds of LO2 for every pound of LH2.-Energia is described as being 318 feet tall, 120 feet taller than it actually was.-The second Hubble servicing mission is listed as occurring in February 1994; it wasn't actually launched until 1997.-It's Stated that the James Webb Space Telescope will "begin its career in 2018." At the time of publication, the launch was still scheduled for early 2021.-Ares I & Ares V are described as using "Saturn V's J-2 second stage." The J-2 was an engine, not a stage.-Roscosmos, an organization that didn't even exist until 1992, is described as having launched Mir and seven Salyut stations.-The mass of the Tempel 1 comet is given as "45 square miles."I imagine if I was an actual space historian, instead of just someone who fantasizes about being one online, I'd notice even more glaring errors. Although the rest of the book doesn't suffer quite as badly, the entries focusing on American manned spaceflight are a mess. This is yet another example of a book that simply shouldn't have been published in its current state.

The launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957 ushered in a new epoch in the history of mankind, the Space Age, effectively paving the way for mankind to leave the Earth's atmosphere and explore the frontiers of space. Since then, about a dozen countries, hundreds of people, and dozens of companies have reached outer space through rockets, spaceplanes, space probes, space stations, and satellites.Michael Gorn and illustrator Giuseppe di Chiara describe and illustrate the 100 most influential spacecraft conceived in six decades of the Space Age. They divide this book into three eras, each organized by components (spaceplanes, rockets, robotic spacecraft, capsules, and space stations). As for the first era of the Space Age, the Sputnik satellites, but also the Explorer 1 satellite, Luna 1 probes, and Vostok, Mercury, and Gemini manned spacecraft are highlights of why the 1st Space Age was clearly a product of Cold War superpower rivalries, because the launch of Sputnik 1 not only alarmed the US by raising concerns among some politicians about the USSR overtaking the US technologically, but also cast doubt on the US narrative of the Soviet Union as a technologically backward country in which scientific innovative spirit was heavily suppressed by the heavy hand of communist philosophy (in other words, another piece of proof that Soviet tech was just as good as that of the capitalist word). Despite being ahead of the game in manned spaceflight with the Vostok and Voshkod (the latter space capsule was used by Alexei Leonov to perform the first ever spacewalk), the USSR's initial lead in manned spaceflight was eroded not least because of the repercussions of the death of the Soviet space program's founder, Sergei Korolev. The second section can be best described as the beginning of the fading of Cold War echoes in space exploration and the birth of space-based investigation of the cosmos, because it highlights the entry of the European Union into space exploration business in the 1970s, but also records the dawn of orbital reusable spaceplanes with the American and Soviet space shuttles, while highlighting the Hubble Space Telescope and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The Cassini-Huygens and Galileo space probes as a whole helped record information about Jupiter, Saturn, and the biggest moon of Saturn, Titan, while the Giotto space probe became the first spacecraft to investigate a comet. The third and final part of this book illustrates the enhanced complexities of space travel on a global basis and the effects of the dissolution of the USSR on manned space travel by recording America's preparations for exiting the Space Shuttle era with the Orion, the SpaceX Dragon, the CST-100, and Space Launch System, highlighting the ISS as a symbol of US-Russia scientific cooperation in the post-Cold War world, discussing the Chinese Long March rockets as well as the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station and Shenzhou space capsule, and describing the privately funded Falcon and Antares, but also describing space probes and space telescopes built by not just the US, but also the EU, and the world's first privately funded spaceplanes (SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo) and the first US military spaceplane, the X-37B. As a matter of fact, New Horizons will be pivotal in recent space exploration for helping enhance knowledge of Pluto.Giuseppe di Chiara did a good job of providing 3-dimensional illustrations of the spacecraft included in the volume, offering diagrams of the internal structures of illustrated rockets, satellites, lunar landers, and space capsules. He also illustrates the timeline of the evolution of designs for the Mercury, Gemini, Vostok, and Voshkod spacecraft, Space Shuttle, Salyut and Almaz space stations. Diagrams are provided for the flight profiles of a number of space rockets and the Space Shuttle.Although the authors have done a good job discussing how the frontier of space has been exploited by spacecraft built by the Bear, Eagle, and Dragon, they omit a number of spacecraft that they could have found significance in Space Age history. For example, the Hiten lunar probe launched in 1990 was the first lunar spacecraft built by a country besides the US and the USSR/Russia, while the Lambda-4S launched by Japan in 1970 thrust the Far East into the realm of space exploration.If anyone is interested in space technology and its role in shaping the history of space travel, "Spacecraft: 100 Iconic Rockets, Shuttles, and Satellites That Put Us in Space" is a valuable literary guide. As such, it is the first book to describe and illustrate the Falcon, Antares, and Space Launch System but also SpaceShipTwo, the Dragon and Orion space capsules, and the under-development CST-100.