To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers

Chris Gainor is rapidly acquiring the reputation as one of the finest authors of space history books around. He gives a very readable and enjoyable account of the early development of space technology. While I wish the book had been longer, it was a delight to read, and I look forward to more books from this author in the future.

This book is actually a nice effort. It covers a very broad spectrum of subjects in its investigation of the early days of rocket development, concluding with the early days of manned space flight. For someone who's looking for a concise yet comprehensive book on this topic, it does deliver. For me, it was a little scant. One very strange item is the author's selection of the dust jacket photo. It's the exact same picture that's used on the cover of the latest printing of the book "X-15 Diary," but it's rotated 90 degrees to give the appearance of a rocket streaking skyward. It's actually a shot of an X-15 just after its drop from the B-52 mothership, and it's in the horizontal acceleration and gentle initial pitch up phase of flight. Overall, a good book, and I do appreciate the quality paper and binding used by the publisher, the University of Nebraska Press.

I had a really nice surprise on Friday afternoon - a package from the University of Nebraska Press with a copy of the next installment of their Outward Odyssey series, To A Distant Day, by Chris Gainor, about the human history of space exploration. I was a big fan of the first two books in the series, Into that Silent Sea and In The Shadow of the Moon, both of which dealt heavily with human space flight, with Silent Sea taking much of the earlier days from Mercury to very early Apollo and with Shadows taking the lead up to and half of the first lunar landings. In both, I was incredibly impressed with the amount of detail and narrative style of history that laid the American and Russian space programs out in the open, almost comprehensively. After reading both, I have been eagerly awaiting the next one, To A Distant Day, which is due out in April of this year, with the fourth installment due out in the fall of 2008. To A Distant Day takes a step back in the development of human space flight. Where the first two books took care of the rock-star elements of the space program, this book went back - far back to the birth of rocketry. Mercury, Gemni and Apollo would never have taken flight without the vast history of rockets behind them. Gainor's book covers the history of the development of the rocket, from Ancient China's development of gunpower and tracing the development of military rockets across Asia to Europe, through to the First and Second World Wars, while looking at some of the major figures who worked out the mathmatics and physics of rocketry. While it's arguably a more important and vast history, this book is the shortest yet of the Outward Odyssey series, clocking in at 264 pages. The earlier developments of the rocket is gone over a bit briefly, while a bulk of the attention is paid to the efforts of the German Scientists in and around the Second World War, and the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Russia. What we get is facinating, and the shorter read holds the same level of detail and care that the first two books contained. One of the things that I noted was the influence that Jules Verne, whose works constitute the first Science Fiction, had on a number of the early rocket scientists, sparking their imagination as to what was possible in the future. What's even more facinating is at how the rocket scientists around the world, linked by this book, shared a vision of a human in space. Having just started my Master's Degree in Military History through Norwich University's graduate school, it was interesting to me as to the degree to which military elements helped influence the creation of the US and Soviet space programs, especially when one considers the reluctance of multiple governments to weaponize space. The common sci-fi phrase "We come in peace" seems like hypocrisy when one considers the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets, which helped influence both the Russian and US space programs to a huge degree. Like in

"To a Distant Day", the third installment in the Outward Odyssey series ("Into That Silent Sea" and "In the Shadow of the Moon") fully deserves to stand alongside the first two wonderful books hopefully already on your library shelf! However, my initial response to the release of this book was not with the same excitement as the first two books; this wasn't going to be a book about the astronauts and the right stuff, telling us more about their fantastic journeys through new and exclusive personal interviews. In fact, most of the heroes that Mr. Gainor writes about are deceased, but that doesn't stop him from bringing these early pioneers to life. The author recreates the colorful history of how rocketry came to be, and how it grew into the backbone of how we flew to the moon, and more. This is a part of history that I ignored up to now, but after reading "To a Distant Day" I need to read and learn even more about the people who designed and built the first machines capable of breaking earth's grasp. We flew to the moon standing on the shoulders of these early pioneers and geniuses who, in spite of their own idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities deserve their place in history. This book is very well written and just as difficult to put down as the first two books; it's your loss if you don't read it. Thank you Mr. Gainor!

I was looking for a book covering all rocket developers of the 20th century, showing how they interacted, competed and learned from each other. That's exactly what this recently-published book delivers. Its strength comes from the demonstration of these interactions. Learn how the early pioneers such as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard went as far as they could alone, independently of each other, often rediscovering physical laws and each others' work and not even realizing it. Learn how Von Braun's being hired by the German Army prior to WWII ultimately led to Neil and Buzz setting foot on the moon, as well as the establishment of the "military-industrial complex." Learn how the long-mysterious Soviet "Chief Designer," Korolev, rose from imprisonment at a Stalinist gulag to orchestrate the Soviet space effort that very nearly beat the US to the moon. If this book has any drawbacks, I'd say it's a little short. However it does provide an excellent bibliography in its "sources" section for those interested in further reading.