This is a brilliant and enthusiastic book about space exploration and why it still matters. I enjoyed it very much. Not only is Sarah Cruddas skilled at writing in an inspirational way about space, she avoids scientific explanations so that the book can be understood by any reader.
We begin with a foreword by Michael Collins, which should be taken as an endorsement for the content of the book. This is followed by an introduction in which Sarah gives some background to her career and why she’s writing the book. The majority of what follows is a history of the space race, with its achievements and disasters, which if you already know about this, doesn’t tread any new ground. However, it’s so well-written that it’s a pleasure to read anyhow. The last third of the book is about how space technology affects our lives and what the next steps are. There’s a lot of attention paid to satellites, without which our society today would be very different. Some of the content in this book overlaps with a book about the moon I recently read, but in a better style and without insulting anyone. I appreciated the focus on the role of women in space exploration, such as astronauts, the wives of astronauts and as engineers at NASA.
There are no images but none are required, as the most famous photographs referred to are in the public consciousness and you can always look them up online. My only dislike about the book was the frequency of typos.
Recommended especially for readers who are not technically minded but who want to understand why space exploration is so important to everyone on Earth.
Published in 2020 by HQ.
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