Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986-2011 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S) Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Rick Houston Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0803235348 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
"[An] enthusiastic portrayal of the heroic age of American space travel."—Publishers Weekly
(
Publishers Weekly)
“When we talk about the Space Shuttle, we talk about the people. Author Rick Houston’s work here takes it a step further. He reaches to the heart and soul of the people.”—Milt Heflin, former lead Space Shuttle flight director and chief of the flight director office
(Milt Heflin 2013-03-05)
“With the Space Shuttle program now at an end, documenting the amazing thirty-year career of these iconic orbiters holds an untold amount of historical importance. Spaceflight isn’t easy, people pay in blood and sweat to make it happen. Author Rick Houston lends a voice to some of the key people involved in what is not only an American treasure but a global superstar.”—Chris Bergin, managing editor, NASASpaceflight.com
(Chris Bergin 2013-03-05)
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- Series: Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S
- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (December 1, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0803235348
- ISBN-13: 978-0803235342
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
As one of the titles in the University of Nebraska Press' outstanding "Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight" series, Rick Houston's "Wheels Stop" was bound to be a good book, as are all the books in the series. And it definitely is.
But it's a little different than many other spaceflight books. Mr. Houston does not exhaustively cover in great detail all of the Space Shuttle flights between the 1988 STS-26 return-to-flight mission after the Challenger disaster and the final flight of the program with STS-135 in 2011. Rather, in a fast-paced, highly readable style, he presents a fascinating collection of oral-history-type anecdotes based on his extensive interviews with astronauts, program managers, technicians, administrators and ground-support engineers who were involved in those flights, all organized within a relatively loose structure of program and flight events. His story is not chronological, except in the broadest sense. Nor are his mission descriptions strictly sequential. He jumps around quite a bit as he follows the careers of astronauts or the conduct of related missions, such as the Hubble repair and servicing flights. Some missions get a great deal of coverage, while others he mentions barely in passing or not at all. Many missions get just a single anecdote from a single participant. If it sounds a bit chaotic, it is.
But it works. "Wheels Stop" contains a wealth of new, up-close-and-personal information about the Space Shuttle, its crews and its missions, much of which I have never seen in print before. When I finished this volume, I felt I had really gotten inside the heads of many of the people who worked to keep the world's premier manned spacecraft flying its incredible missions.
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