Wheels Stop

October 7, 2013
Flush with the glow of the 1969 Apollo moon landing, a technological and Cold War political triumph, NASA devoted itself to the space shuttle. This was an advanced vehicle that vastly expanded man’s spacefaring abilities and demonstrated the achievements as well as the problems of a complex government program in which (unlike Apollo) money was an object. Journalist Houston (Second to None: The History of the NASCAR Busch Series) writes 10 long, more or less chronological chapters on the 135 flights. Clearly a space buff and not a historian, he fills his account with astronaut biographies, interviews, and quotes; technical details; personal rivalries; and often stormy NASA politics. The Challenger and Columbia disasters receive their grim chapters along with another on the greatest achievement—launching and caring for the Hubble Space Telescope. Readers will find the section on American–Russian space flights absorbing, and will be mourning the end of the shuttle program by the final chapter. America has no manned program in the works, so those curious about the next big step must look to China and console themselves with this enthusiastic portrayal of the heroic age of American space travel.

December 1, 2013
Leave aside debates about its costliness and riskiness. From an astronaut's perspective, flying the space shuttle was a fantastic experience. This work, a set of accounts of those experiences, runs from the 1988 resumption of the shuttle missions after the Challenger explosion to the final one in 2011. Houston interviews many of the people who boarded a shuttle in this period; culls their memoirs, such as Jerry Linenger's Off the Planet (2000); and details their career paths into the astronaut corps. A personal rather than technological portrait of the shuttle emerges, with astronauts' feelings about their engagement with shuttle technology, rather than the technology itself, receiving primary emphasis. In the text, that engagement emerges in descriptions of training for complicated missions, such as those that kept the Hubble Space Shuttle in operation, and in reflections on the view of Earth from space. And since in these years rendezvous with space stations required training with cosmonauts, Houston's interviewees express their attitudes about learning Russian and cooperating with their former space-race rivals. Providing vicarious access to astronauts, Houston will attract the spaceflight set.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)