Review: Amazing Stories of the Space Age

by Jeff Foust
Monday, February 6, 2017

Amazing Stories of the Space Age: True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts from the Annals of Spaceflight
by Rod Pyle
Prometheus Books, 2017
paperback, 297 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-63388-221-8
US$18

The Space Age, assuming one defines it to begin with the launch of Sputnik, turns 60 later this year. Thse decades of history, plus many years more of efforts leading up to Sputnik, provide plenty of opportunities for stories big and small. Many are well known, but others less so, particularly for the general public.

Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle is an effort to try and tell some of those lesser-known stories. The book is a collection of accounts of little-known projects and studies, or behind-the-scenes tales from more famous missions, that while familiar to many readers of this publication, will be enlightening to broader audiences.

The book’s subtitle gives it something of a sensational feel: Nazis in space! Soldiers on the Moon! It seems better suited to the pages of a tabloid like the Weekly World News than a space history book. But both are firmly rooted in factual studies, recounted in the book’s initial chapters. The former is about studies in Nazi Germany of the Silverbird, a suborbital spaceplane that could fly from Germany and drop bombs on America. The latter is about Project Horizon, a US Army study from the dawn of the Space Age that studied establishing a military base on the Moon, including plans to defend the base from invading Soviet troops. Neither, of course, got off the ground.

Pyle specializes in these could-have-been stories in the book. There are chapters about efforts ranging from the nuclear-powered Project Orion spacecraft concept to the Air Force’s “Blue Gemini” and Manned Orbiting Laboratory projects to studies in the 1960s of human missions to fly past both Mars and Venus. There are, though, real-life accounts in the book as well, including the loss of Soyuz 1 and the demise of the Viking 1 lander because of a coding error.

Each of these accounts is entertaining, and he offers details that should be new to even many hardcore space enthusiasts. The book’s one flaw, though, is a lack of rhythm: there’s no obvious order, either chronologically or by subject, of the stories he tells in the book. For example, the chapter on Project Horizon and one on LUNEX, a similar Air Force study of a lunar military base, are separated by chapters on Project Orion and Wernher von Braun’s 1950s concepts for Mars missions. One ends up with historical whiplash going from decade to decade and topic to topic.

In the book’s final chapter, about the “Major Matt Mason” toy line of the early Space Age, Pyle looks ahead to the future and a changing, more commercial space era that he hopes will reinvigorate public interest in spaceflight. “In this brave new world of space,” he writes, “many oddball designs and plans will come and go, just as they did in the 1950s and 1960s.” Which means there should hopefully be many more amazing stories from this new space age.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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