posted 12-20-2009 11:43 PM               

"Voyager" is a narrative of the Voyager mission - its conception, its launch, its trek through the solar system. But along with that chronicle is a running commentary that positions the mission within the long trajectory of exploration by Western civilization and asks how Voyager's journey resembles and differs from earlier expeditions. The organizing device is the concept of three great ages of discovery of which Voyager may be the grand gesture for the third. The third age had its transition in Antarctica and its first major announcement with the International Geophysical Year; its geographic domains are ice, ocean, and space; its cultural context is an uneasy bonding with a greater modernism. The book is a successor of sorts to two previous books: "The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica" (1986) and "How the Canyon Became Grand" (1998).

• Hardcover: 480 pages
  
• Publisher: Viking Adult (July 22, 2010)
  
• ISBN-10: 0670021830
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0670021833

posted 07-18-2010 07:52 AM               

What with Mars rovers that tweet and space telescopes with Facebook fan pages, one might think space exploration today is just another part of modern life. In this new book, however, environmental scholar Pyne reminds readers of the rich cultural history that underlies humankind's exploration of the cosmos...

posted 08-03-2010 12:44 PM               

• Wall Street Journal
  Star Performer

  The Voyager story itself is an amazing one, and Mr. Pyne tells it skillfully. We forget too easily what a gamble the project was. The execution of history's greatest feat of navigation -- in which a spacecraft had to be placed within 62 miles of its target at a distance of more than five billion miles -- was astonishing, though somehow NASA, in its inimitable way, made it look boring. The hardware, the software and even the astrodynamics involved were new and largely untried. Mr. Pyne deftly shows how the development of rocketry, of orbital science and of computer technology all came together just in time to take advantage of a once-every-176-years planetary alignment that would allow a spacecraft to make close passes of outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- all in one long trip.

• Salon
  Voyager: Who needs astronauts?

  Salon spoke with Pyne about the importance of the Voyager mission, the overlap between science fiction and reality, and our misguided desire to shoot humans into space.

• Dallas Morning News
  Book review: 'Voyager' by Stephen J. Pyne

  If an alien intelligence ever decides to come to Earth looking for "V'ger," hand them a copy of Stephen Pyne's new celebration of 20th-century space exploration for background reading.