IDEAS & KNOWLEDGE
Space & Astronomy
14 books
Fourteen books about the universe beyond the atmosphere — what it is, how we know what we know about it, what the exploration of it has cost and produced, and what it means for the human species to be the only creatures (as far as we know) capable of understanding the scale of the cosmos they inhabit. The list covers the history of space exploration, the science of cosmology and astrophysics, the memoir tradition of astronauts and the people who got them there, and the philosophical writing that has tried to reckon with what the universe's size implies about everything else. Space writing is one of the most reliably excellent corners of popular science.
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Rocket Men
Robert Kurson
What is it about the story of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission that will get you into the Christmas spirit? Well, if you were alive back in 1968 (and of an age to remember it), you’ll surely know the answer. The story of Apollo 8, and the brave men guiding that historic mission, began in the summer of 1968 with hasty preparations to make a full orbit of the moon. Prior to this mission, no spacecraft had left Earth’s orbit. To say it was a big deal is an understatement. All that rigorous and stressful planning came to fruition on launch day: December 21, 1968. Everything started off well, and over the course of about 3 days, 3 of America’s bravest men traveled to the moon. The culmination of the story, and Robert Kurson’s superb book about the mission, comes on December 24th when the astronauts made a live Christmas Eve broadcast to the living rooms of the world. Nobody on the ground knew what the astronauts would be saying or sharing. So when they went live and read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis, it’s safe to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the country. A disastrous mission could have ruined the Christmas season for years to come; instead, it was a triumph of the American spirit. I read this book in the middle of summer, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t fill me with more Christmas spirit — along with good old fashioned patriotism! — than I’ve just about ever experienced.
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Carrying the Fire
Michael Collins
Collins was the Apollo 11 astronaut who stayed in the command module while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon — orbiting the far side of the Moon alone for hours without radio contact, arguably the loneliest human being in history. His memoir is the best account of the space program available: technically precise, unexpectedly funny, and written with the specific dry intelligence of a man who watched the greatest achievement in human history from the best possible vantage point and understood exactly what he was seeing. Around 450 pages and the deepest cut on modern exploration. James Hansen's First Man is the full authorized Armstrong biography for the reader who wants the dedicated account of the man who actually stepped out.
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Moondust
Andrew Smith
By 2004, when Smith conducted these interviews, nine of the twelve men who had walked on the Moon were still alive. He found them dispersed across American life — a senator, a sculptor, a man selling real estate, a man who had become a Christian mystic, a man who had become an alcoholic and then recovered — and asked all of them the same question: what happened to you after you came back? The answers are stranger and more varied than the official NASA story suggested. Walking on the Moon turned out to be the kind of experience that some men could metabolize and some could not, and Smith's book is the most complete account of what the twelve actually became after doing the most extraordinary thing any human being has ever done. The unexpected-angle entry on this list. Cross-references to Carrying the Fire, which is the account of the mission itself; this is the aftermath.
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Hidden Figures
Margot Lee Shetterly
Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson were Black women working as human computers at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia during the space race — doing the mathematics that put John Glenn in orbit and brought Apollo home — in a facility that required them to use separate bathrooms and eat in a separate cafeteria. Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia knowing these women as neighbors, and the book she wrote from their records and interviews is both a history of their mathematical contributions and an account of the specific absurdity of a country that needed their minds and segregated their lunch. The uncomfortable entry on this list. Cross-references to the US History and Martin Luther King Jr. lists. The reader who wants the pure mathematics should note that Katherine Johnson's trajectory calculations for Apollo 11 are available in NASA's technical archives; this is the human story around those numbers.
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Two Sides of the Moon
David Scott & Alexei Leonov
Scott commanded Apollo 15 and walked on the Moon. Leonov commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission and was the first human being to walk in space. They alternated chapters across the same Cold War space race from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, producing the only book that places the American and Soviet programs in direct dialogue. What emerges is that the Soviet program was technically comparable and operationally reckless in different ways — more willing to accept casualties, more willing to suppress failures — and that the men on both sides were motivated by the same combination of patriotism, ambition, and the specific desire to go somewhere nobody had been. Cross-references to the Cold War list. The reader who wants the full Soviet story should follow this with Starman on this list, which covers Gagarin's arc from triumph to suppression to death.
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Starman
Jamie Doran & Piers Bizony
Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth on April 12, 1961, returned a hero, was celebrated across the Soviet Union, was quietly grounded by a government that could not afford to lose him, and died in a training flight crash in 1968 at 34 under circumstances that have never been fully explained. Doran and Bizony had access to previously classified Soviet archives and to colleagues who had never spoken before, and the portrait they produced is of a man who was genuinely exceptional — physically brave, intellectually curious, constitutionally charming — and who was consumed by the system that made him famous. The deep cut on this list and the Soviet counterpart to Carrying the Fire: where Collins's memoir is reflective, this is investigative, and what it finds about how the Soviet space program treated its people is considerably darker. Cross-references to the Cold War list.
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Rocket Boys
Homer Hickam
In 1957, a fourteen-year-old boy in a West Virginia coal mining town watched Sputnik cross the night sky and decided to build rockets. His father ran the mine and expected his son to work in it. His physics teacher believed in him. He taught himself calculus from a library book. He and his friends won the National Science Fair in 1960 and every one of them got out of Coalwood. Hickam's memoir is the best American story about what it looked like on the ground when the space race began — not in Houston or Cape Canaveral but in a dying Appalachian town where the sky was the only exit available. Cross-references to the American South list. The reader who wants the wider institutional story should read Rocket Men on this list; this is the story of what Sputnik meant to a boy who could see it from his backyard.
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Ignition!
John D. Clark
Clark spent his career developing rocket propellants at the Naval Air Rocket Test Station and wrote this history of liquid rocket propellant development in 1972 as an account of what it was like to work with compounds that would explode if you looked at them wrong. Several of the researchers he describes lost fingers. Some lost more. The writing is dry in the way that only a chemist describing near-death experiences can be dry, and it is very funny. The deep cut on this list: out of print for decades, released as a PDF that circulated among rocket engineers, finally republished in 2017. Elon Musk has cited it. It explains more about why rockets work the way they do — and why so many early ones didn't — than any book available to a general reader. Cross-references to the Popular Science and Craft, Skill & Mastery lists.
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What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard Feynman
The second half of this book is Feynman's account of serving on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster — how he got there, what he found, and how he demonstrated on national television that an O-ring placed in a glass of ice water loses its resilience, which was the entire explanation for why seven people died. Feynman spent the investigation frustrated by NASA's bureaucratic culture — the gap between management's stated probability of failure and the engineers' actual estimates — and his appendix to the official report, which NASA tried to suppress, is the most important document produced about institutional failure in the history of American technology. The disaster entry and primary source entry on this list. Under 250 pages. Cross-references to the Popular Science list, where Feynman's memoir Surely You're Joking appears as a primary entry.
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First Man
James Hansen
Armstrong gave Hansen access to his personal papers and sat for extensive interviews over several years — access he had never granted before and never granted again before his death in 2012. What Hansen found was not the taciturn, modest man of public reputation but a deeply private engineer who processed the Moon landing as a technical achievement requiring more analysis than celebration, who was genuinely puzzled by his own fame, and who remained uncertain about what it all meant for most of his life. The biography entry on this list and the most authorized account of the most significant flight in human history. Cross-references to Rocket Men on this list for the institutional context, and to Carrying the Fire for Collins's perspective on the same mission from the command module.
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Pale Blue Dot
John Hill
In 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward Earth from 3.7 billion miles away and took a photograph. Earth appears as a fraction of a pixel — a pale blue dot in a beam of scattered sunlight. Sagan wrote this meditation on that image, on what it means that everything in human history happened on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, and on what it would require for our species to survive long enough to matter to the universe. Different from Cosmos — that book tours the universe; this one asks what the universe means for us — and Sagan earns his second appearance on this list because the books are doing different things. Cross-references to the Cosmos entry on the Popular Science list and to the Religion & Faith list, where the same questions about human significance are approached from the other direction. Under 350 pages.
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Packing for Mars
Mary Roach
Roach spent time at NASA, JAXA, and various space medicine research facilities asking the questions that official space literature doesn't answer: how do you go to the bathroom in zero gravity, what happens to your body if you vomit inside a spacesuit, what did the first astronauts actually eat and what did it do to their digestion, has anyone ever had sex in space. The answers are more interesting than you expect and Roach is funnier than anyone who writes about space has any right to be. The humor entry on this list and the most accessible one — requires no prior interest in space to finish, and most readers who finish it develop one. Cross-references to Carrying the Fire and Endurance on this list for the same physical reality described without the comedy. The short entry at under 350 pages, and the one most likely to be read in a single sitting.
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Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
Alfred Lansing
Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition ends before it starts when his ship, the Endurance, is trapped and slowly crushed by pack ice, leaving 28 men stranded on the Weddell Sea ice shelf with no communication and no rescue coming. What follows — the open-boat crossing of the Drake Passage, the unmapped crossing of South Georgia on foot — is the most sustained display of leadership under pressure in the history of exploration. Nobody died. Lansing wrote it from interviews with surviving crew members decades later, and the pace never lets up. If you read one book on this list, it's this one.
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A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
A masterpiece of science writing, a classic for a reason. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is a seminal work in our collective understanding of the universe. If the universe has a beginning, does time have a beginning as well? How can we as people fit into our time in the universe? Hawking’s writing answers these questions and more in an engaging, accessible, and often thrilling way. Buy at Amazon