Journey Into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration

Bruce Murray, former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, provides in this book an excellent discussion of the planetary science program of the United States from the dawn of the space age in the 1950s to the end of the cold war. It is an entertaining and interesting analysis of the cause of planetary space exploration written by a brilliant iconoclast in the space science community. Murray's ideas are always fascinating to consider, and his running critique on the role of humans versus robots in space exploration is certainly worth considering. This book is divided into five parts starting with the search for life on Mars, and continuing through "Probing Warmer Worlds," Voyager and the Grandest Tour Ever," "Lost in Space," "Comet Tales," and a reprise on returning to Mars. In each section Murray brings his hard-edged perspective and sometimes biting wit to trace the evolution of planetary exploration between the 1950s and 1980s. I will comment on two very interesting aspects of this book. The first is the section that Murray writes at the beginning of the book on the longstanding human fascination of the possibility of life on Mars that Percival Lowell ignited and that culminated in the Viking landers on Mars in 1976. After years of belief that Mars might harbor life, the Viking landings demonstrated that the prospects for discovering extraterrestrial life had been oversold. Murray explains here that the Viking landers had been ballyhooed as a definite means of ascertaining whether or not life existed on Mars. The public expected to find it, and probably so did many of the scientists, and what would happen when hopes were dashed? Murray argued that "the extraordinarily hostile environment revealed by the Mariner flybys made life there so unlikely that public expectations should not be raised." Carl Sagan, who fully expected to find something there, accused Murray of pessimism. Murray asserted that Sagan was far too optimistic. And the two publicly jousted over how to treat the Viking mission. Murray, as well as other politically savvy scientists and public intellectuals, argued that the legacy of failure to detect life, despite billions spent on research since the beginning of the space age and over-optimistic statements that a breakthrough was just around the corner, would spark public disappointment and perhaps an outrage manifested in reduced public funding for the effort (pp. 61, 68-69, 74, 77). Murray seems to have been right, for after the Viking missions the U.S. did not send another probe to Mars until the 1990s. Second, Murray is at his best in charting the bobs and weaves, ebbs and flows of space science politics in relation to the human spaceflight agenda of NASA. Without question, NASA's emphasis has been on human spaceflight--it consumes approximately half of the NASA budget every year--and the planetary exploration agenda must always be cognizant of this overarching priority. As the Space Shuttle came on line in the earl