Kennedy Space Center: Gateway to Space

Easy to read and understand. It gives a comprehensive story of the Kennedy Space Center as well as the various missions NASA has undertaken. I understand now the different types of rockets and the history leading up to the Apollo 11 successful moon walk. This book was a page-turner. I could not put it down and read it all in one weekend.

NASA's Kennedy Space Center is the gateway to the stars for U.S. space efforts, and there's no better person to explore its history than an author who is an expert on space and space exploration. It's the only complete history of the Center and provides armchair readers with a complete tour of Center history, operations, and launch efforts. The mission-by-mission coverage leaves out nothing.

A few years back, when the possibility of "space tourism" arose, I wrote a novel fantasizing about winning a seat on the shuttle. Not only was it hugely enjoyable to write, it gave me permission to dive into the NASA archives and read all the space-related books I could find. I wish I had this at hand at the time. Half history, half coffee-table book, "Kennedy Space Center" is the next best thing to a guided tour. "Kennedy Space Center" traces the story of the Cape Canaveral site with vivid prose and 150 pictures, many of them rare. There's so many excellent shots that it becomes difficult to pick the highlights. There's a satellite view of the site that clearly show the launch pads and the massive Vehicle Assembly Building, so big that the 35-story-tall Apollo rocket could be assembled inside. There's a lovely time-lapse shot of Columbia lifting off, its contrail arcing over two of its predecessor rockets, that could have popped off a cover of Astounding Stories. There's photos from NASA archives of Mercury and Redstone launches; technicians at work on the shuttle; the mammoth 6,000,000-pound crawler that crushes rocks into sand as it transports rockets to the launch pads at a speed of under a mile per hour (the speedometer, however, goes up to two); the Skylab and shuttle missions. While the photos are good, the prose is better. David West Reynolds interweaves descriptions of the facility with a history of the space program that's concise, elegant and moving. Unfortunately, the future of NASA is unclear. Thompson devotes a chapter to President Bush's space initiatives, but the costs are high, there are many constituencies to satisfy, and there are questions over NASA's ability to turn the massive agency in new directions. It may be that the future lies in privately funded enterprises such as Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. If so, "Kennedy Space Center" may stand, not as a signpost to the future, but a memorial to a glorious past.