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We're trying to judge this book by two conflicting criteria, here - three actually. Is it a work of literature, eloquent and well-written, by an experienced wordsmith? We all agree it is. Is it a work of scholarship, explaining a historical event accurately and in credible context? Nobody has argued with my factual criticisms on that ground - they've ignored them. Or - the third tongue-in-cheek criterion - is the book a victim of sloppy smearing, deserving of sympathy and knee-jerk support, that allows defenders to ignore any substantive criticisms? The author describes the central event of the entire book - Armstrong's "small step" onto the Moon - wrong. How I found out about his error shouldn't be the question - how he made the error and got sympathetic reviewers to find excuses for it, seems more important. The author is clearly a talented editor and writer, as his back flap bio shows. But there's a clue about the scholarship - the favorable reviews of the book on the back jacket are by fellow authors, not spaceflight veterans or specialists. And it's not hard to see why this may be so. Whenever a good writer ventures into regions beyond his/her technical expertise, prudent editing calls for review of the manuscript (however well written it may be) for technical errors. There's always some amount of slack in complex topics, and a threshold of significance below which occasional errors are 'just life'. All writers (myself included) deserve some breaks. But this book's frequent errors in terminology, technology, and outright factual events is far in excess of what should be tolerable, even in a book aimed for a popular audience with no previous exposure to this level of detail. These errors occur page by page, sometimes multiple times per page or even per paragraph. They make anybody familiar with the subject matter repeatedly wince, and they make anybody familiar with book publishing ask, where was the editor? Where was the technical review process? The following list is by no means exhaustive, but it can serve as a catalog of the kinds of things that should never have been allowed into print - if the author and publisher wanted to produce a factually reliable book. How 'trivial' they are is up to potential buyers to decide, especially since they should expect to find many, many more examples of this kind. The author's use of 'rocket science' terminology is confused throughout the book. On page 120, he describes the calculation of an orbit that included "the equatorial plane's inclination" - when he meant to say, "inclination of the orbital plane to the equator" [the inclination of the equatorial plane is ZERO, always]. He regularly refers to "Newton's escape velocity" of 18,000 mph for an orbiting satellite (p. 125), or 'escaping Earth's gravity' at that speed (p. 99). But 'Escape Velocity' to break free of Earth's gravity is 25,000 mph; the speed to remain in a low orbit is 'Orbital Velocity' (18,000 mph). The Boy Scouts of America merit badge on 'Space Exploration' requires the kids to know the difference; the author doesn't. There is a helpful 'notes' section in the back of the book, but only a fraction of the asserted facts are actually documented. Checking a few at random uncovers a high error rate: on p. 99, the author ascribes a description of Russian rocket designer Korolyov to "his lifelong colleague and bitter rival" Glushko, but the cited source (on page 146, not 121) attributes the quotation to an entirely different engineer named Ozerov. Somebody is supposed to check these things - perhaps the author's high status in the industry gave him immunity. Page 96, the author asserts that "the essential formula for rocketry is simple," and then gets it wrong by describing the need for "compressed oxidizers like LOX and LH2" [the latter is a fuel, not an oxidizer, and neither is 'compressed' to any degree in a rocket]. On p. 99 he discussed "the use of LOX and LH2 for fuels". The first step in understanding rocket science is to know the difference between a fuel and an oxidizer, and the author doesn't. Maybe he should have called a Boy Scout. Page 107, discussing the fate of German rocket scientists brought to the US and to Russia, the author describes the von Braun team's living conditions near El Paso as "a life not so very different from what their counterparts taken to Russia would eventually find in the new cosmodrome in the desert of Kazakhstan". But this is an imaginary and specious contrast that overlooks facts reported elsewhere in the book. All the Germans in Russia were repatriated prior to the founding of the Kazakhstan rocket base, and they had spent all their time in isolated communities north of Moscow - not one of them EVER got to the Kazakhstan base. This is creative writing with flair - but no reality. Page 113: In 1954-5, "the navy tried to merge its Vanguard rocket development with the air force's Titan IRBM and the Thor ICBM (intercontinental) efforts." The 'Vanguard' was conceived in 1955, using a navy 'Viking' missile; the Titan was the intercontinental missile and the Thor the medium-range missile, the author reverses them. On page 139, "the United States... had stationed in Europe 160 Atlas ICBMs." Not so. Again, the author (and his fact-checkers and editors) confuses the names of vastly-different military missiles. Just a chronology of his misunderstanding of what was and wasn't a "Jupiter" missile is worth several more pages. Page 116: In 1957, "the USAF had given up on its Atlas rocket and switched to engineering the kerosene-and-LOX-burning Titan." The Atlas was actually test flown years ahead of the Titan, which 'burned' not kerosene and LOX, but hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. Page 116, the author writes: "...the August 1957 test firings of the navy's Vanguard were catastrophic," but there weren't any such firings, catastrophic or otherwise - not until October (successful first stage test) and December (pad explosion). The Navy team that was doing Vanguard soon got transferred from its parent lab to NASA, but on page 129, the author states that as NASA was founded it absorbed a number of military facilities, including "the Navy's Research Laboratory (which would be renamed for Goddard)." By no means - just one of the projects (Vanguard) was transferred, along with other teams from other labs, to an entirely new location - and the original Naval Research Lab is still where it was before. Page 117, the author refers to the Sergeant missile, "fueled by liquid hydrogen' - when it was a solid-fuel rocket. On page 125, describing the firing of the Sergeants comprising the three upper stages of Explorer-1's booster (solid rockets with a 6-second burn time) the author somehow claims that the first of the three upper stages fired for 247 seconds - somebody's typo, or bad note-taking. Page 118, the author refers to a CIA study "in 1959, using information from Corona spy satellites," when in fact the first spy satellite didn't make a successful mission until mid-1960, as he explains a few pages later. On page 137, in a long list of space failures: "August 10, 1960: Corona 13 a success, but its capsule was lost at sea." By no means - Discoverer-13, as it was called ('Corona' was a top secret project name) was the first spacecraft ever recovered, by any nation, from orbit. It splashed down and was successfully retrieved. But the erroneous claim that it was 'lost' is part of a dramatic narrative. Page 126, the author mixes up the first two American satellites when he writes: "Since Explorer I weighed only 3
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