The Space Shuttle

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Nonfiction

"To boldly go ..."

THE SPACE SHUTTLE
Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA's First Space Plane
By Piers Bozony
Zenith Press, 900 color photographs

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Man arrived on the moon courtesy of two capsule-shaped spacecraft. It was NASA's Space Shuttle and its wings that rekindled Buck Rogers images in the minds of space buffs and put the world at work in outer space 135 separate missions.

Piers Bizony and Zenith Press have produced an amply illustrated "coffee table book" that attempts to cover the complete history of mankind's first space plane. Chapters are "Stages," seven in total, with a foreword and a worthwhile appendix that includes complete mission summaries. Stage Seven, "Readying the Bird" will be particularly interesting to space buffs as it gets into the details of preparing the orbiter. Also covered is the U.S-Russia rapprochement that resulted in the shuttle being used to ferry personnel and supplies to the international space station. 

Suffice it to say the images are spectacular. The author gives credit due to other nations and astronauts participating in the shuttle program, and he covers every mission from first to last. Additionally, he provides a brief recap of the two missions that destroyed the Columbia and the Challenger, killing all of each crew. There also interesting asides as exampled by the history behind the names of each of the shuttles. The Enterprise was a sub-orbital test vehicle, and the Endeavour, Atlantis, and Discovery are the surviving shuttles.

The system wasn't perfect, as evidenced by the fatalities, but considering alone the missions to deploy, repair, and refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope, mankind has profited magnificently during the thirty years of Space Shuttle service.

 Bizony is the author of a biography of Yuri Gargarin and One Giant Leap, a history of the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon, also published by Zenith Press.