IMAGINING SPACE

Anyone flipping through the pages of this large-format volume and glimpsing its many full-page color images might well decide, "Ah, another coffee-table book! This would make a great Christmas gift for junior..." Anyone would be correct on both counts. However if anyone is, like me, a space buff born around the midpoint of the last century, they ought to wrap it up as soon as possible. Otherwise, the book is liable to wind up on their shelf instead of in junior's eager hands.

For Launius and McCurdy have, with the help of a host of others involved in space studies, produced a thoroughly researched and well written text to complement that excellent collection of illustrations. Its nine topically organized chapters present an overview of the history of the Space Age, a history that began in grandiose visions and proceeded through a substantial number of worthy achievements, many surprises, some disappointments, and a few grievous failures to bring us to the present. From that vantage point we can look ahead to greater achievements — but perhaps not with the same sort of youthful enthusiasm that lit up the first half-century.

Many of the names familiar to space buffs appear. Wernher von Braun and Arthur C. Clarke are there, of course, as are Yuri Gargarin, John Glenn and other astronauts. Carl Sagan and Gerard O'Neill have a place, as do newer names like James Benson and Robert Zubrin. The major events are mentioned. But there is not a great deal of detail; this is not a reference book or a history text. For that, you must look to other sources. (Many are listed at the back of the book.)

Imagining Space succeeds admirably at what it attempts: to reprise the Space Age in words and pictures, along with some analytical commentary, and give us some idea of where we may go from here.

I did find a few things to complain about. See the errata page, linked below. But overall, this is an excellent piece of work. Its list of books1 contains 77 entries, each one annotated. The two-level index is very complete, and includes illustrations (their page numbers in italics).

Those words end the main text of Imagining Space. The commentary continues in its Epilogue, which reviews the progress we have made from 1950 to date and points out how often that progress unfolded in ways no one had predicted. True to its title, that Epilogue projects a hopeful future, but the hopefulness it presents is not the ebullient hopefulness of the Space Age's first fifty years; rather it is a mature hopefulness that admits of surprises and disappointments.

Having passed the fifty-year mark myself, I find that a welcome sentiment. What we have here, then, is more than just another coffee-table book. It is a thoughtful examination of the past and the near future of the Space Age, logically broken down into nine chapters as shown in the table of contents below, and I recommend it highly.

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This page was last modified on 11 July 2014.