| ROCKET DREAMS How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond Marina Benjamin New York: Free Press, 2003 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7432-3343-9 | ||||
| ISBN 0-7432-3343-3 | 242p. | HC | $24.00 | |
| Page 98: | "Of course Goddard (who ended up spending World War II designing experimental airplane engines for the Navy)..." |
| Technically, what he was designing was Rocket Assisted Take-Off (RATO) units. But "experimental airplane engines" comes close enough. |
| Page 114: | "...much as if someone would be bound to come by were I to pitch up a tent beside the Great Pyramid of Giza." |
| Odd phrasing; I've always heard it as "pitch a tent" — no up or down about it. |
| Pages 121-2: | "The program relied on the construction of giant, rotating, tubular (or toroid, meaning doughnut-shaped) colonies in low Earth orbit similar to the kind of structures that science fiction author Larry Niven later placed at the center of his Ringworld novels." |
| Similar? Only in the sense that a child's sandbox volcano is similar to Olympus Mons. |
| Page 123: | "...he [Tsiolkovsky] invited his readers to imagine flotillas of glassy cylinders, each of them 1000 meters long and 10 meters wide and designed to feed and house 100 people." |
| These dimensions seem wrong. A structure that skinny would be relatively fragile and hard to control. Perhaps 1,000 by 100 meters is correct. |
| Page 125: | "Visionary utopianism or proto-fascism? It's hard to say, considering that before he joined Wernher von Braun's V-2 production line in Peenemunde (effectively gaining his ticket to the free world) Ehricke commanded a division of Hitler's tanks on the Russian front." |
| Considering that most officers in the Third Reich's army had to be Nazi party members, it is indeed hard to say. Damnation by innuendo seems out of place here (and lame, as well). |
| Page 131: | "For Brand, the immediate appeal of O'Neill's ideas was that it fit right into his own vision of technology as means to ends..." |
| Error of number: S/B "was that they fit". |
| Page 175: | "Recognizing that long-distance human travel in space is not going to happen, at least not for centuries, both projects [Pathfinder and Phoenix] have managed to close the gap between here and there—Earth and elsewhere—by exploiting the culture of entertainment and the mechanics of communication." |
| I think it's a misinterpretation to ascribe such motives to those projects. I think it's an even bigger mistake to predict that long-distance human space travel is so far off. |
| Page 179: | "Instead of engraved plaques, however, the Voyagers carry Earth's Greatest Hits—twin copper phonographs, each containing a pictographic brochure..." |
| Incorrect term: S/B "Earth's Greatest Hits—twin copper phonograph records". |
| Page 189: | "For decades, NASA's funding of SETI had been patchy and nervous, but after Nevada Senator Richard Bryan, a longtime SETI foe, led a successful campaign to ax SETI funding for the fiscal year of 1993, NASA never again went to bat for SETI in congress, and government funding for Project Phoenix and other searches has never been restored." |
| Chronological error: Project Phoenix was never government-funded. It arose from the ashes, so to speak, after funds for NASA's SETI projects dried up; hence the name "Phoenix". |
| Page 192: | "He [Frank Drake] was extremely convincing, for example, in a public debate held in Silicon Valley in the spring of 2001, where he banged heads with University of Washington geologist Peter Ward, co-author of Rare Earth—a book that garnered a huge amount of publicity when it was published the previous year because it makes the currently unfashionable argument that life is extremely rare, if not entirely unique to this planet." |
| Over-generalized: S/B "it makes the currently unfashionable argument that complex life is extremely rare". |
| Page 213: | "Cyberspace, it seems, is an America of the mind less because of its wide open spaces than because a rerun of the how the West was won could be staged there." |
| Typographical error: Almost certainly S/B "a rerun of the film 'How the West was Won' ". |
| Page 212: | "While NASA officials have long understood the need to show that they weren't ignorant of space's potential appeal to commerce (so they could run it up the flagpole whenever someone in Congress brought it up), the agency has never in fact needed to rely on commerce—nor will it have to anytime soon. This has led to a paradoxical situation in which the agency is forever talking up the possibility of manufacturing pharmaceuticals or developing new alloys in space, and of needing to make space attractive to a whole new range of paying customers, and yet has shown itself to be singularly inept at handling the occasional commercial propositions that actually come its way. One small example will do: Princeton University physicist Bob Dicke approached NASA in the 1970s about placing reflectors on the Moon that would help scientists study its motion. Costing up the work needed to customize off-the-shelf reflectors, he estimated that he could supply the equipment needed for his experiment at a cost of $5000 per unit. NASA accepted the proposal but insisted on making the project an in-house affair and contracting out the fabrication of the reflectors to one of its long-time aerospace partners. As a result, NASA ended up paying $3 million per unit." |
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