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Review: One Small Step
by Jeff Foust
Monday, January 25, 2010
One Small Step: The Inside Story of Space Exploration
By David Whitehouse
Quercus Books, 2009
hardcover, 208 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-84866-037-3
US$12.99
The history of space exploration has been told, and retold, seemingly countless times by now. Some try to put a new spin on it through the use of new information or by looking at the subject from a different perspective. Others, though, simply retell the now-familiar stories their own way. It’s more the latter approach than the former than explains One Small Step, a concise history of human spaceflight by British science writer David Whitehouse.
| Although the book makes strong use of these first-person accounts, those already familiar with the history of the space age will find few revelations there. |
Whitehouse takes the reader down a familiar path, starting with early rocketry developments by Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun and proceeding past the customary set of milestones: the launch of Sputnik, the flights of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard, the race to the Moon, and later developments like the Space Shuttle and space stations like Skylab, Mir, and the ISS. Where Whitehouse tries to set his book apart from others—and presumably the justification for the “inside story” subtitle—is through the use of word-for-word accounts of some of the key events by astronauts, cosmonauts, and others directly involved in the missions in the US and USSR. These accounts can range from a couple of sentences to a few pages at a time. The source of these statements, though, isn’t mentioned (the book doesn’t include a bibliography or endnotes), so we don’t know if these are from the author’s interviews with these people, oral history accounts or other interviews, or some combination. (One version of the book comes bundled with a CD containing “over 40 rare archive recordings”; that version is not widely available in the US.)
Although the book makes strong use of these first-person accounts, those already familiar with the history of the space age will find few revelations there: there may be some tidbits here and there, but generally there’s little that would alter overall perceptions about events. Also, while the book’s title refers to space exploration in general, the book is really about human space exploration: unmanned satellites are rarely mentioned in the book after the launch of Sputnik. For those who many not be that familiar with the history of human spaceflight, though, One Small Step does offer a way to learn more about those events, particularly from the perspectives of those who participated in those missions.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site and the Space Politics and NewSpace Journal (formerly Personal Spaceflight) weblogs. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone, and do not represent the official positions of any organization or company, including the Futron Corporation, the author’s employer.
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