This New Ocean : The Story of the First Space Age

Rating:
Summary: A Thoroughly Researched History of Space
Review: Burrows offers the best attempt so far at a comprehensive history of the Space Age in a single volume. There are two flaws. First, the commercial side of space is almost untouched. The driving engine of space development today is in the tens of billions of dollars being poured into communications satellites and other applications. Burrows spares only a few pages for this topic. The other flaw is Burrows' tendency to snipe at the evil American military-industrial complex without trying to understand or explain the actual thinking behind US military space endeavors. Despite these reservations, this book is a first-rate achievement. It is simply indispensable for students of space history.

Rating:
Summary: A Thoroughly Researched History of Space
Review: Burrows offers the best attempt so far at a comprehensive history of the Space Age in a single volume. There are two flaws. First, the commercial side of space is almost untouched. The driving engine of space development today is in the tens of billions of dollars being poured into communications satellites and other applications. Burrows spares only a few pages for this topic. The other flaw is Burrows' tendency to snipe at the evil American military-industrial complex without trying to understand or explain the actual thinking behind US military space endeavors. Despite these reservations, this book is a first-rate achievement. It is simply indispensable for students of space history.

Rating:
Summary: Mostly a political history
Review: I enjoyed this book very much, and thought it filled a niche I hadn't thought of before. Its strongest focus seems to be on the political environment of space exploration, where "political" has 2 meanings: 1) The traditional fight for funds in the US Congress and also the environments in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and 2) the infighting for limited funds among the different areas of the civilian and military space establishments. (The "office politics" of space, if you will.)

In this context, the book could be thought of as a space history from a management point of view. There's not a lot of technical detail here, esp. for those who have read a lot of space books. But Burrows does a good job of explaining why certain decisions were made in the different programs, given the historical context. It leads to a greater understanding of why we have the systems we have today, and how they have evolved, fight by political fight. The parts about the US spy satellites, the space shuttle, and solar system exploration were definitely enlightening from this point of view.

As noted with other reviews, "This New Ocean" has rather startling breadth, but sometimes maddeningly little depth. This is OK and to be expected in a survey book; my only problem was that it felt uneven. Some parts were covered with a broad stroke that gave the outlines but not every last detail, while others felt tacked on or thrown in. In particular, the development of the Russian space program after Khrushchev felt shallow, esp. coming after an extended section on the US program. This was a little unsatisfying, given the importance of Russian rockets in the more commercial environment of the post-Cold War world.

Overall though, this book is clearly recommended reading. It enlarged my view beyond just the science and technology to see how things get done, and has stimulated me and made me aware of new areas and ideas to learn about.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and incredibly re-readable
Review: On the 30th anniversary of the 1st lunar landing, it was refreshing to read an account of the space race that looks past the heroics of manned space flight into the real dynamics of space exploration - the cold war and the internecing politics that fueled both civilian and military applications for spaceflight technologies. Beginning in the early 20th century and progressing with wartime Germany's co-opting of rocket science, we see a hobby for dilettantes become a mortally serios scientific endaevor. America's efforts, long considered lackluster throuought the war, had progressed far enough by its end to have surpassed the work of Robert Goddard, America's homegrown rocket-visionary. Progressing through the cold-war, overcoming Eisenhower's warnings of the big government needed to run both warlike and peaceful space efforts, the space race accelerates the pace of military technology and the military-industril complex, even as the US gov't strives to present civilian applications for rockets - manned exploration and satellites. As comprehensive a work as this, the author sometimes swamped by his own history. That the author can display a definite bias against manned spaceflight seems less a black mark against this heavy tome than a reminder that he has reoriented himself. A heavy work you'll have to read over and over.

Rating:
Summary: Overly biased and superficial
Review: Rather than providing us with an impartial, well-told narrative of space exploration, Burrows apparently feels the need to tell the story of virtually every political and bureacratic battle dealing with NASA. He spends little time writing about the actual space missions; instead, he spends the majority of his time with some potted political commentary that I saw as irrelevent. He also feels the need to tell us his opinion on several issues, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of space exploration and its benefits. Even its description of the greatest events in the history of spaceflight are brief and dull. He tells the story of Apollo 11 in about a page in a half, while Apollo 13 gets about a page because Burrows felt the need to mention the lack of interest in spaceflight at the time, rather than mentioning Lovell, Haise, and Swigert's epic return to earth. He also says that the Apollo spacecraft, during the Apollo 13 mission, was described by Jim Lovell in his autobiography, Lost Moon, as "downright dangerous." Lovell was referring to the spacecraft at the time of the Apollo 1 fire, not Apollo 13. I would not recommend this book, except if you are interested in hearing of the political and bureacratic issues facing NASA.

Rating:
Summary: Too many good stories for one volume
Review: The breadth of "This New Ocean" forces Burrows to treat the most compelling technical and personal achievements of the Space Age too lightly. With rocket launches more reliable today than fifty years ago, it's difficult to understand what the big deal was about the early rocket launches. A deeper engineering background than he offers would permit a better appreciation of the early rocketeers' work. Moreover, Burrows' writing seems heavy-handed at times (especially in condemning the effects of the Soviet political structure on research there). Burrows seems most comfortable writing on space-based reconnaissance (thanks to his earlier work on that subject), and he carefully relates the internecine funding battles of the 1950s and 1970s to the political climates of those times.

This volume is best used to place technological developments in a political context; look to Baker's "History of Manned Space Flight" or "The Rocket" for more careful consideration of the engineering.

Rating:
Summary: A fine Space history book at someplaces.
Review: This book is very loosely a space exploration history dealing with the actual missions. It is more of how space exploration happens and not what happened during the missions. The whole Mercury program gets maybe a page and a half while spy projects get numerous pages. Along with great political details this book runs for over 600 pages making a book for only a serious historian interested in the space program

Rating:
Summary: Broad, politically-focused account of the space program
Review: Whew! I feel as if I've spent a significant chunk of my life reading this book! It's a sweeping history of the space program that delves deeply into the background and circumstances, so much so that it's not till the halfway point of the book that it gets to Gagarin, Shepard, and the first manned space flights.

The first part is actually the strongest, covering in detail what went before (going clear back to Daedalus!), particularly the contributions of Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, and the German V-2 team.

Even when it does get to what we think of as the space program proper, technogeeks may be disappointed because it's short on technical detail but but long on the individuals and circumstances responsible for the rockets: not what the Saturn V was but how and why it came to be.

The breadth leads to some mildly startling brevity: Apollo 11 is covered in a sometimes annoyingly inaccurate three pages: The alarms on the landing approach were not "ignored" by the controller but understood as not being critical, and there were more than six seconds of fuel left in the engines at touchdown.

But there are other books for that (Chaikin's of course being the first to come to mind). What I read here but not elsewhere in addition to the background included extensive coverage of the military space program, particularly reconaissance satellites but also the never-to-be Dyna-Soar and Manned Orbiting Laboratory programs.

Weaknesses include a jarring tendency for the author to abruptly step forward and insert his own opinions, usually in sentence fragments; a sometimes glib, too-clever tone; oblique references to incidents or people mentioned ten or fifty or hundreds of pages ago that the author expects the reader to pick up on; the occasional inaccuracy, as with Apollo 11 above or with the Ariane rocket described as French rather than European; and an appallingly bad index which, among other gaps, has no mention of Project Gemini despite fairly good coverage in the book itself.

And the final chapter, covering the present and future of the space program, seems to be the weakest. It comes across as kind of a laundry list of what's going on and what's planned: Hubble, lunar mining, Pathfinder, Cassini, John Glenn's shuttle flight, future Mars missions, Zubrin's plans, terraforming Mars, and the possibility of missions to the stars all take a brief moment on the stage before being ushered off again.

Still, it's an awesome feat to cover in one book the history of the space program in all of its manifestations: Russian, American, manned, unmanned, military, civilian. I was impressed and will likely be referring back to this book often.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Comprehensive History of Spaceflight Ever Attempted
Review: William E. Burrows brings to the task of writing a comprehensive history of spaceflight a wealth of background and understanding. He added to that in-depth research and lucid writing to place between two covers the most exhaustive and complex history of the subject ever published. At some level, perhaps, he tries to do too much, but overall he succeeds admirably in explaining the political, technical, scientific, economic, and cultural history of humanity's recent adventure in space. It is a long read, and sometimes requires effort on the part of the reader to wade through exceptionally complex scenes, but "The New Ocean" is overall a stunning achievement. The chances are pretty good that readers will be able to answer almost any question they might have about spaceflight by referring to this book. And if they cannot find everything they want on the subject, the exhaustive bibliographical references point to additional material. I recommend this as a starting point for serious exploration of the history of spaceflight worldwide.