From the Bookshelf: Into the Black
May. 31st, 2018 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOn a short vacation at the end of last month, amidst visits to museums and general sightseeing I dropped in to an ordinary if large library and headed for its space travel section. There, I saw a book I remembered having heard of before about the first space shuttle mission. Flipping quickly through Rowland White's Into the Black before closing time left me thinking I'd like to have more time to read it. Before finishing my vacation I'd already looked up that it had an e-book edition, aware of the way books pile up around my place. Before committing to that purchase, though, I checked my area bookstore just on the offhand chance to see a paperback copy of Into the Black on the shelf, and I went ahead and bought it, thus adding to the piles.
Maybe I should admit more to mental reconstructions than actual memories of watching that very first space shuttle launch on TV, having been pretty young in 1981, but it did make an impact on me the years that followed didn't altogether topple. Along the way, the National Geographic article about the mission was a useful source of information (although I was young enough to scribble pencil "exhaust flames" over motion picture stills of the solid rocket boosters igniting and coloured in some line drawings of the orbiter with markers; years later, I managed to get a clean copy of the issue from a family friend). The article had included a comment from the astronaut Bob Crippen that, even after seeing some pieces of heat shield tiles missing from where he could see that in space, he wasn't too worried about the much more vital parts of the heat shield out of sight at that point. The explanation he offered had seemed plausible; White's book expanded on comments I'd seen in the years in between that people weren't worried just because of plausible theories (the use of which finally turned tragic) but because back then American spy satellites had managed to take classified pictures of Columbia in space.
The book intertwined two narratives to get there, of the ever more elaborate spy satellites thought valuable enough to be classified almost at once and of the people who'd worked on the Apollo missions moving straight on to try for another leap in technology. That they'd had to do that on a tighter budget might have helped shape the cruel simplification of "shuttle bad, everything else good"; on the other hand, even with the spy satellites seeming to wind up mass-produced Hubble Space Telescopes meant for looking down instead of out, being shielded from public oversight hadn't helped the "Manned Orbiting Laboratory" of the US Air Force be finished in the 1960s, such that the pilots trained for that had to transfer over to NASA and get involved in the space shuttle program. As well, even as I wondered "kept secret from who?", the book did relate what I'd heard before about the Soviets, aware NASA's optimistic numbers selling shuttle launches didn't add up, concluding the delta-winged vehicle had to be a military weapon and dropping plans to one-up Apollo with an eventual moon base to spend money they perhaps couldn't afford on a delta-winged spacecraft of their own.
Ultimately, the book seemed "can-do," and I did find it interesting. Perhaps the oddest thing about it to me, though, was that, being a British edition also available for sale in Canada, it kept using the word "programme." Even with all the "-our" and "-re" endings I do try and pepper my spelling with, the word got to feeling kind of strange in American contexts. I can admit, though, it also got me thinking of a MSTing I wrote of a period conspiracy theory trying to make the first space shuttle launch as seen on TV a cover for grandiose secret disasters (save for the inevitable impression of shoddiness tied up with expectations of how things "ought" to look, expectations that just might come more from movies than the real world), just conceivably trying to cover for a conspiracy theory just previous. I just hope I managed to offer some antidotes to "but what if it did happen the way this one guy insisted?" paranoia while still seeming funny.
Maybe I should admit more to mental reconstructions than actual memories of watching that very first space shuttle launch on TV, having been pretty young in 1981, but it did make an impact on me the years that followed didn't altogether topple. Along the way, the National Geographic article about the mission was a useful source of information (although I was young enough to scribble pencil "exhaust flames" over motion picture stills of the solid rocket boosters igniting and coloured in some line drawings of the orbiter with markers; years later, I managed to get a clean copy of the issue from a family friend). The article had included a comment from the astronaut Bob Crippen that, even after seeing some pieces of heat shield tiles missing from where he could see that in space, he wasn't too worried about the much more vital parts of the heat shield out of sight at that point. The explanation he offered had seemed plausible; White's book expanded on comments I'd seen in the years in between that people weren't worried just because of plausible theories (the use of which finally turned tragic) but because back then American spy satellites had managed to take classified pictures of Columbia in space.
The book intertwined two narratives to get there, of the ever more elaborate spy satellites thought valuable enough to be classified almost at once and of the people who'd worked on the Apollo missions moving straight on to try for another leap in technology. That they'd had to do that on a tighter budget might have helped shape the cruel simplification of "shuttle bad, everything else good"; on the other hand, even with the spy satellites seeming to wind up mass-produced Hubble Space Telescopes meant for looking down instead of out, being shielded from public oversight hadn't helped the "Manned Orbiting Laboratory" of the US Air Force be finished in the 1960s, such that the pilots trained for that had to transfer over to NASA and get involved in the space shuttle program. As well, even as I wondered "kept secret from who?", the book did relate what I'd heard before about the Soviets, aware NASA's optimistic numbers selling shuttle launches didn't add up, concluding the delta-winged vehicle had to be a military weapon and dropping plans to one-up Apollo with an eventual moon base to spend money they perhaps couldn't afford on a delta-winged spacecraft of their own.
Ultimately, the book seemed "can-do," and I did find it interesting. Perhaps the oddest thing about it to me, though, was that, being a British edition also available for sale in Canada, it kept using the word "programme." Even with all the "-our" and "-re" endings I do try and pepper my spelling with, the word got to feeling kind of strange in American contexts. I can admit, though, it also got me thinking of a MSTing I wrote of a period conspiracy theory trying to make the first space shuttle launch as seen on TV a cover for grandiose secret disasters (save for the inevitable impression of shoddiness tied up with expectations of how things "ought" to look, expectations that just might come more from movies than the real world), just conceivably trying to cover for a conspiracy theory just previous. I just hope I managed to offer some antidotes to "but what if it did happen the way this one guy insisted?" paranoia while still seeming funny.