by James S. Trefil
Scribner's, 1980
225 pp. $12.95
By Ronald Blythe. Pantheon reprint,
1980.318 pp. $3.95
By John Mack Faragher.
Yale reprint, 1980. 281 pp. $6.50
By Robert M. Stern and William J. Ray,
Univ. of Nebr. reprint, 1980. 197 pp. $3.95
By Peter Steinfels. Touchstone reprint, 1980.
336 pp. $5.95
; histo- rian Walter McDougall looks at developments abroad; NASA historian Alex Roland weighs the practical "payoffs" of space exploration against the disappointments; and historian Bruce Mazlish ponders the disparity between our achievements in space and the tepid public response.
RIDING HIGH
John Noble Wilford
On July 20, 1969, two American astronauts planted human bootprints on the gray regolith of the moon. It was one of the most impressive achievements in the history of Man, an...
On July 20, 1969, two American astronauts planted human bootprints on the gray regolith of the moon. It was one of the most impressive achievements in the history of Man, and it was recognized as such at the time. Yet, almost immediately, Con- gress and the White House took an ax to the budget of the Na- tional Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). There was no public outcry. While NASA, during the 1970s, sponsored a series of unmanned missions to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat...
A thumbnail definition of a great power between the two world wars might have been: "A nation that builds its own air- planes." The updated version would be: "A nation that launches its own spacecraft." While the United States and the Soviet Union are still the Big Two, and remain the only nations capable of orbiting satellites at will, the diffusion of space technology has already begun.
Leaving aside the United States and the Soviet Union, five nations (France, Britain,...
The dreamers who first launched man into space were not much concerned about what he would do when he got there. When the question was put, many of them simply referred to Columbus's discovery of the New World, as if the analogy were exact and the implications self-evident. Others dusted off the apocryphal story about Ben Franklin at the first balloon flight in Paris in 1783. "But what good is it?," someone asked the American minister. "What good is a newborn baby?," Franklin rep...