Voyager

Starred review from May 3, 2010
“The saga of the Voyagers’ trek is carrying the inherited narrative of exploration to its outer limits,” writes environmental historian Pyne (How the Canyon Became Grand). By looking at the mission of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and comparing it with past voyages of discovery on Earth, Pyne offers a unique and engrossing history of the Western world’s love affair with such journeys. The two space probes were launched on a “Grand Tour” of space in 1977; both are still traveling and returning data to Earth, with Voyager 2 leaving the solar system. Pyne calls the Voyager mission the hallmark of a “Third Great Age of Discovery,” similar to ambitious seagoing expeditions in the 16th and 18th centuries. As with those earlier journeys, Voyager was motivated by a mix of desires: military, political, economic, and a love of pure discovery. By narrating both the Voyagers and past voyages—such as Henry the Navigator’s—Pyne captures the Western passion for exploration and the lure of the unknown, while relating the fascinating story of two fragile spacecraft continuing after three decades their brave quest across space and time. Illus.

Starred review from May 15, 2010
An environmental historian blends the past, present and future of exploration in a unique account of the Voyager space program.

Pyne (Life Sciences/Arizona State Univ.; Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction, 2009, etc.) sets for himself a difficult task—vivifying for the general reader the 30-year journey of an unmanned spacecraft. After all, our interest in exploration is often inextricable from our fascination with the explorers themselves. The author ingeniously overcomes this built-in narrative disadvantage, where the technology itself is the exploring agent, by placing the Voyager mission—two spacecraft designed to visit the outer planets of our solar system and beyond—squarely within the context of several hundred years of exploration. The International Geophysical Year of 1957–58, a project designed to take the scientific temperature of the Earth, oceans and space, kicked off the Third Great Age of Discovery, which arose from quickened national rivalries inspiring an unusual period of expansion. Previous Ages of Discovery featured all manner of extraordinary achievements, and each culminated in a Grand Tour—e.g., Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, von Humboldt's Latin American expedition—that perfectly captured the era's ambition. For our own Age, Voyager is that venture, a crowning gesture of remarkable cultural consequence. Pyne reports fully on the program's genesis and evolution, Voyager's discoveries and its signal encounters with the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and interstellar space. The author's acuity and interpretive skill come most impressively to bear when he regularly suspends the narrative,"cruising" he calls it, to draw striking connections between Voyager's journey and expeditions of the past. The many parallels—political, technological, social, economic, military, scientific, even spiritual—fix Voyager's place in the constellation of discovery, even as Pyne distinguishes the mission and our age from its ancestors.

A challenging but immensely rewarding read.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2010

More than just a history of the Voyager space missions, this book by an environmental historian (Year of the Fires) defines and compares Western civilization's three great ages of discovery. The first, launched by Portuguese mariners, occurred during the Renaissance, the second coincided with the Enlightenment, and the third, the current age of discovery, began in the mid-20th century with deep-sea and outer-space exploration. The twin Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, embarked on a grand tour of the solar system, visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and making numerous discoveries along the way, including previously unknown moons and volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io. Outstanding among the third-age missions of discovery, Voyager's perils, failures, and successes mirrored those of the great human explorers such as Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt. VERDICT Most will find this book hard to put down, but readers interested in the history of spaceflight and the history of human exploration will be especially enthralled.--Jeffrey Beall, Univ. of Colorado at Denver

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2010
For this history of the Voyager missions to the outer solar system, Pyne goes beyond technological description. Comparing them to Renaissance and Enlightenment explorations, he raises points of cultural and mechanical similarity between the spacecrafts and, for example, Columbus and his ships. Pyne is interested in the impulses for geographical exploration past and present and discusses Spanish and Portuguese rivalry or British and French competition as analogues to the cold war context of American and Soviet planetary missions. This authorial concern, while offering historical precedents to the spectacular revelations of Voyager, might surprise a reader expecting a space-mission narrative. To be sure, Pyne covers milestones from the conception of a deep-space journey to the Voyagers present positions on the verge of interstellar space, but he is equally interested in the society that launched them. He reflects on justifications for Voyager by enthusiasts and how its missions are merely the modern version of venturing to new lands. Humanity could see such lands first but once: Voyager did that, justification enough for Pynes cultural framework for recounting its trailblazing reconnaissance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)