Review: To Orbit and Back Again

by Jeff Foust
Monday, November 25, 2013

To Orbit and Back Again: How the Space Shuttle Flew in Space
by Davide Sivolella
Springer Praxis, 2013
softcover, 528 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-4614-0982-3
US$44.99

The Space Shuttle has often been described as one of the most complex, if not the most complex, machine ever built. That complexity, though, is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is evidence of the challenge faced by the engineers who designed the shuttle orbiter, external fuel tank, and solid rocket boosters, developing a launch system far different, and more capable, than previous rockets. It’s also a testament to the thousands of technicians who prepared the shuttle for each mission. But, on the other hand, that complexity was ultimately its undoing, both in terms of the expense to operate the vehicle and the accidents that cost the lives of 14 astronauts.

That complexity isn’t obvious to the casual observer, who didn’t think much about the technical difficulty of launching and landing a giant winged vehicle. Dive into the details, like those described in Davide Sivolella’s book To Orbit and Back Again, and it becomes apparent just how complex the shuttle was, and how remarkable it was that it flew as successfully as it did for three decades.

Sivolella, an aerospace engineer with a self-described “life-long passion” for the Space Shuttle (he was born a few months after the launch of STS-1), wrote To Orbit and Back Again to fill a gap he saw between the introductory books about the shuttle that offered few technical details, and far more advanced technical papers and manuals. “A machine as complex as the Space Shuttle really cannot be described in a few pages!” he writes, and his book devotes more than 500 pages to the subject.

Sivolella devotes much of the book to an examination of the various major subsystems of the orbiter: avionics, structures, thermal protection, and the main engines and other thrusters, among other topics, as well as the external tank and solid rocket boosters. The last few chapters look at the flight operations of the Space Shuttle itself during launch, in orbit, and landing. There is, as promised, considerable technical information about the shuttle’s systems, far more than the general reader might expect, or want. A sample sentence from the avionics chapter: “For example, the GPC set running PASS GNC would perform a bus masking on the PL data buses on-orbit, when the PL buses were assigned to the SM GPC.”

However, the book also includes some anecdotes from the engineers who designed the shuttle and the astronauts who flew them. Just a paragraph after the above sentence about the orbiter’s computers, Sivolella includes an anecdote from former astronaut Brewster Shaw, who was pilot on STS-9, which suffered two failed computers as the crew was preparing to deorbit at the end of its mission, a problem traced to loose bits of solder in those computers.

To Orbit and Back Again has the endorsement of another former astronaut, Story Musgrave, who wrote the book’s foreword. “It is massively detailed and massively technical, so isn’t for the faint of heart, but that is okay because it is as I have referred to it, an exposition; it is fully explanative all the way through,” Musgrave writes, adding that the book could have served as a useful textbook for him as he prepared for his six shuttle flights. And that is a pretty good assessment of the book: it is not for the casual reader looking for a basic history or overview of the shuttle program, but someone seeking to go beyond the basics of the engineering of the shuttle. The Space Shuttles may never fly again, but this book provides a good reminder of what made those launches possible.

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 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.

Home