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The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity
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The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity description
Will we walk on distant planets? Terrestrial problems may have regained center stage in our awareness, but the mythic and poetic possibilities unearthed by the space programs of the 20th century have changed us forever. Historian Wyn Wachhorst captures the essence of our birth as an interstellar species in The Dream of Spaceflight, a collection of five essays spanning 500 years of scientific and technological achievement. The marriage of curiosity and hard work that drove heroes like Johannes Kepler, Wernher von Braun, and the Apollo astronauts (one of whom, Buzz Aldrin, wrote the foreword to this collection) to conceive, develop, and implement the knowledge and machinery of space travel comes alive in Wachhorst's evocative prose. The subtitle of the second piece, "Nostalgia for a Bygone Future," speaks volumes about the thoughtfulness and creative energy the author devotes to his craft. Wachhorst knows why we cared so deeply about the space program during its heroic phase. And he explains our curious ambivalence now that human involvement is restricted to mission control and orbital flights perceived as not much different from extended plane rides. The reader comes away from The Dream of Spaceflight freshly inspired--if a few U.S. senators read this, NASA will get all the funding it needs. --Rob Lightner |
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The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity Customer Reviews
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Sublime! The Space Age considered as a grand spiritual quest.
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This is definitely one of the best books that I have read within years. I've read it a few times now and some passages - on the paintings of Chesley Bonestell (the Caspar David Friedrich of alien landscapes), which match the serenity and sublime poetics of those paintings, on Alexei Leonov's and Ed White's first spacewalks, on the lift off of the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket (gives me tears in my eyes, the same as if I see it on DVD), on Percival Lowell, on the fantasy worlds of Astounding Science Fiction and Startling Stories, to mention only a few - are so great! They give you a kind of experience which normally only good poetry can give you. I read these passages again and again, they are aesthetically addictive! It is impossible to convey the sublime poetic quality of Wachhorst's prose. Really, every sentence in this book is a gem by itself. There is no other book, not even the books of Carl Sagan, that convey that sense of wonder (what the old Greeks called thaumazein) that propels us human beings toward space travel so intensely as this book does. It's not only poetry of course, it's also a very informative book (Wachhorst is a historian), but this book teaches you how important the mastery of language is to get a message through. It is also a very philosophical book, not in the analytical sense but more in an existentialist way. You'll learn a lot about the meaning of human transcendence while reading Wachhorst's reflections and meditations on our ultimately incomprehensible and utterly absurd condition as lonely intelligences stuck on a small piece of rock somewhere in the infinite vastness of the cosmos. We are, Wachhorst writes at some point, 'the ballroom innocents of Spaceship Earth - frail seed of life itself, afloat for an instant on the surface of forever'. This wonderful, exceptionally well written book is a must read for everyone, not only space enthousiasts. I dare to say that it is essential reading. How great that this book exists!!!
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