Tag Archives: Space

The Visioneers – W. Patrick McCray ***

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It may sound like a job at a Walt Disney theme park (where designers are called imagineers), but ‘visioneer’ is Patrick McCray’s portmanteau word combining ‘visionary’ visioneerand ‘engineer’ – not a hand-waving futurologist, but a scientist or engineer who is coming up with blue sky ideas that are, nonetheless, based on the projection of solid science and engineering.

The two key figures here are physicist Gerard O’Neill, who devised space colonies, and engineer Eric Drexler who was at the forefront of the nanotechnology movement, both dating back to the heady days of the 1970s. Their ideas are put in the contrasting context of limits – an influential group, the Club of Rome had recently published dire warnings of the limited resources available to human beings, and arguably both these threads were about ways to escape the limits, either by reaching outside the Earth, or into the microcosm.

The opening of the book promised a lot – it looked as if it was going to be really exciting and engaging. But overall McCray doesn’t really deliver. The problem is that this is essentially a social history rather than a piece of popular science writing. Historian McCray makes it clear early on he isn’t going to be dealing much with the actual science and technology (which is perhaps just as well when one the few mentions he has of actual science is a distinct blooper in saying ‘Unlike time travel, designing a space colony violated no obvious physical laws’ – if the author would care to take a look at How to Build a Time Machine, he’d discover time travel violates no physical laws either). And that is a big shame.

While what we read provides interesting context (if spending far too long on, for instance, Omni magazine) there really is very little about the actual ideas and the science behind them – just glancing references that intrigue but never clarify. I appreciate this was what McCray was setting out to do, but it is frustrating as the book would have been so much better if had been significantly beefed up on the science side.

If you are looking for a social history of these two big ideas that still seem as far away as they did in the 1970s (and a book with the longest index I’ve ever seen), go for it. But don’t expect to have any detailed grasp of what the ideas actually were.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Stars and the Dust that Made Us – Raman Prinja ****

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This is, without doubt, one of the stronger members of the ‘The Universe Rocks’ series – helped by the fact that there are few more amazing topics than stars. In the book, young readers are taken through how stars are born, the life cycle of the Sun, different types of stars, the role of stars in making the other elements from hydrogen, and the final destinations of stars, including, of course, neutron stars and black holes. There’s some really meaty material here and though Raman Prinja does sometimes leave out the best bits, there’s enough to real grab the imagination and inspire a young astronomer.

What is also good is that the activities are quite strong and well focussed on the subject. We have had complaints with some of the other books in the series that creaky old science projects (like the dreaded baking powder and vinegar volcano) are hauled out of the closet to pad out a book where it’s difficult to produce appropriate activities, but in this title the activities are spot on. We are invited to make an experiment to simulate why the stars twinkle, we do an ingenious experiment with a table tennis ball and a tennis ball to see a kind of shock wave in action, and we take a look at the stars themselves to perform a survey and make up our own constellations. Excellent.

There are a few quibbles. The whole series is too dark and low contrast. It’s always a problem with illustrated books on space – the publisher can’t resist the temptation of using a black background for many of the pages, but the result is a rather murky visual style. I also did think there were some good bits missed. No reference to the role of quantum tunnelling in fusion in the Sun, for instance, and it’s not made clear enough that stars can’t go beyond iron in producing elements without the help of a supernova. Similarly I would have liked to have seen not just why stars twinkle, but why planets don’t. But there is plenty to enjoy.

Overall, a good introduction to stars and nucleosynthesis for the young reader that is definitely recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg

To the Planets and Beyond – Raman Prinja ***

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Another in the ‘The Universe Rocks’ series of slim illustrated astronomy/cosmology books for children, this is a guide to the planets, where they came from and what’s out there around other stars.

Generally speaking a good addition to the series, with some good solid content, though I’m not sure that the two page spread on volcanoes really deserves to be there except to justify having that science fair classic, the baking soda and vinegar volcano as one of the four activity pages. Let’s face it, there’s a limit to the activities you can do when you are dealing with planets.

I was also less than overwhelmed by the activity of making a sun dial – not because there’s anything wrong with it as an activity, but rather because it’s stretching things to make it have a lot to do with planets. The best of the activities by far was unrolling 90 sheets of toilet roll and using this as a scale model of the solar system. This really was a fun and original suggestion.

Plenty of reasonable content, then (though the overall feel, as with many of the books in this series was rather too dark and muddy in appearance), but not the most inspiring of the books.

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Review by Jo Reed

Spacecraft and the Journey into Space – Raman Prinja ***

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Space travel is the ultimate mix of potential excitement and factual disappointment, so it’s a difficult one to get the balance right. The fact is it’s very difficult to get out into space, and even harder to get out of the solar system (in terms of doing it in a practical time). Raman Prinja’s slim volume for children gets the balance pretty much right. At this age, you’ve got to get plenty of excitement in there – but there needs to be some realism too.

I like the way the book starts with telescopes, which gives the vast majority of our ‘exploration’ of space and probably always will. And there’s a fair summary of what we’ve achieved (though I think there could have been a bit more on the Voyager missions, especially as Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system around the time the book was written). There could have been a bit more too on future possibilities, I think. To suggest solar sails could get a spacecraft to ‘super fast speeds’ is probably impractical – they seem much more the canal barge of space – and I’d have liked to have seen some serious future spaceship engines and perhaps even a bit about the speculative warp drive.

There are a few, rather low key activities like making a rainbow (why?) and a balloon rocket. These perhaps could have been beefed up a bit. The cover’s a bit dull too – in fact, the real thing was rather more murky than the image shown here.

Overall an entirely acceptable addition to the ‘The Universe Rocks’ series, but probably not the most outstanding.

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Review by Jo Reed

Awesome Astronomy – Raman Prinja ****

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Part of the Science Crackers series (I think in the sense of ‘being a cracker’ rather than ‘being crackers’), this is a slim large format book introducing the basics of astronomy. Each page contains a mix of text and illustrations, combining lively drawn images with some good photographs. It works well as a basic introduction to astronomy, with a mix of informative sections with opportunities for hands-on activity, from making your own craters to projecting constellations. It’s a shame, though, there wasn’t a lot about hands on astronomy – actually going out there and looking at things.

Mostly the book works well. The content is sound, though can be a bit plonking, defining what stuff is without much in the way of storytelling. There are plenty of facts, but I would have liked a bit more finesse. Sometimes things could do with a little more information too – so we are told, for instance that constellations are patterns people saw in the way stars are grouped together – it would have been good to say they aren’t actually grouped that way, they just happen to look that way from where we’re standing.

Overall it’s a good little book with plenty of content.

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Review by Brian Clegg

UFOs Caught on Film – B J Booth ***

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As a teenager I was fascinated by every weird and paranormal thing that you could watch a TV programme or read a book about. I revelled in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. And though books on Borley Rectory probably made ghosts my all time favourite, they were closely followed by UFOs. What was not to love about spacecraft from another world?

There’s no doubt that back then I would have loved this smallish landscape format hardback stuffed full of UFO pictures or, as the subtitle puts it, ‘amazing evidence of alien visitors to Earth.’ As an adult, though, I have serious doubts.

I have no axe to grind about the existence of UFOs. I am sure they do exist in the sense of being unidentified flying objects, though I very much doubt that they are extra-terrestrial craft because of the impossibly large scale of the universe. Even if you did achieve faster than light drive, there is just so much of it, the chances of a backwater like ours being regularly visited is tiny. But I am afraid I found many of the comments in the book naïve in the extreme. I have no reason to believe that the author is deliberately deceiving the reader – and yet what he has written bears very little resemblance to logical analysis.

To a healthily sceptical eye, many of the pictures look to be fakes. Like many other people, I suspect, I went through a phase of mocking up flying saucer pictures in my teens. I didn’t do this for any personal gain – I never sent them to newspapers or published them in any way, I simply did it for the fun of it. I liked flying saucers. I used two techniques. Some were plastic models, suspended from near-invisible fishing line and sufficiently out of focus to conceal the fact they were models (today this would be even easier to do with modern photo editing techniques). Others were pictures of a metal hubcap, thrown into the air and photographed, spinning, in flight.

One of the problems with the hubcap technique is that it tended to fly, and so to be photographed, at an unnatural angle – yet time after time these “unexplained and inexplicable” shots in the book are of fuzzy, out of focus hubcap-like objects at the same kind of angle as I found so irritating when I tried to fake my pictures. Two others look just like old fashioned outdoor suspended electric lights with the cable either out of shot or retouched out of the image. Others look like nothing more than a clay pigeon, or a bird or the sun. It’s only the way the text describes the shape as having UFO-like characteristics that makes us see a flying saucer.

Worst of all, the book includes the “classic” photo of a collection of UFOs over the Capitol building in Washington. There is nothing in the text to suggest that this picture has long since been debunked. And yet if you take a look at the whole photo, rather than the cropped image in the book showing just the building’s dome and nearby sky, it is entirely obvious what has happened. The UFO formation is an identical mirroring of a formation of lights running along in front of the building. It’s nothing more than lens flare, absolutely, definitively. Yet there is not a word about this in the book.

I have no problem with a book leaving things open to the reader, but where there is evidence against a photograph it really ought to be presented. Without this, the book is more fan fiction than science fact. It was fun to see the photos and speculate as to how they were taken. I enjoyed the enthusiastic commentary. But this shouldn’t be taken as a persuasive document that UFOs are visitors from another world.

I did, incidentally wonder how what was primarily a picture book would hold up on the unformatted environment of Kindle so I downloaded the opening sample – I would say, if you want this book, definitely go for the physical version. The Kindle version just doesn’t do it justice.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Out Of This World – Clive Gifford ****

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This rather handsome little hardback has the right feel for a next generation popular science book for young readers. It still has the fun and illustrations of something like the Horrible Science series, but it feels more modern (and robust), more of today than the sort of frozen-in-time culture of the Beano that pervades the ‘Horrible’ books. Having said that I wish they hadn’t used the really old fashioned, early Tomorrow’s World ‘hi-tech’ font for the section titles.

We start from the Earth and take a tour outwards in the solar system and the universe, following up with the inevitable stuff on telescopes, space travel and a touch of cosmology. It’s all fine, with lots and lots of content. The only thing really that has been omitted is picking up more on the fun side that comes out of Horrible Science. I missed both the humour (even though I’d prefer it to be a bit more modern) and the personal touch. There wasn’t enough about the personalities in this book – it’s all fact, fact, fact.

As is often the case with a book like this, the physics is just a touch weaker than the  astronomy. Mostly it’s not too bad, but when talking about gravity, for example, I would have liked to have seen a little bit on general relativity – it’s easy enough to make it approachable to this age group – and the explanation of microgravity on a space station is misleading it suggests the pull of gravity is practically zero, where actually it’s around 90% Earth normal, it’s just that astronauts are weightless because they are falling.

Overall, then, a good solid book on astronomy, space and cosmology, but one that isn’t going to set the world on fire.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Space Chronicles – Neil de Grasse Tyson **

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I really struggled with this book. I love space and space travel – I have lived through and been thrilled by the entire space race and the development of space science. I expected to love a book by a great astronomer and science populariser, but instead I pretty well had to give up, part way through.

There are two problems. The lesser one is the structure of the book. It consists of a collection of articles, interviews and such that Tyson has produced on the subject of space exploration. This inevitably means there is repetition. A lot of repetition. It’s not that what he is saying is not interesting, but after you’ve heard it for the tenth time it loses its novelty. Perhaps the most interesting thing is the way Tyson is so obviously pulled in two directions. On the one hand he appreciates how superior unmanned satellites and explorers are from a bang-per-buck science viewpoint. On the other hand he believes manned missions are essential to raise interest levels. But of course manned missions are very expensive and almost purely political/military in role, so he really does have to go through some entertaining gymnastics to defend them.

But the thing that made me give up was the sheer jingoism of the book. If you aren’t an American, I can guarantee this book will irritate you. Here’s one example, the words of an interviewer speaking to Tyson (who Tyson doesn’t argue with): ‘If we land on Mars, how are we going to know if USA is number one if an American astronaut is standing next to a French guy? Are we going to say, “Go Earth!”? No, we’re going to say, “Go USA!” Right?’ So basically international cooperation like CERN is a waste of time and money – all that’s important, all that space science is about, is knowing that USA is number one.

An even better example, as it is purely Tyson’s own remarks is when he is talking about the aerospace industry, bemoaning the loss of US control. He says ‘In the fifties, sixties, seventies, part of the eighties, every plane that landed in your city was made in America. From Aerolineas Argentinas to Zambian Airways, everybody flew Boeings.’ I’m sorry? I worked for an airline in the 1970s, and I can tell you this is total baloney (which is apparently American for bilge). Remind me, for example, who built the Comet, the first jet airliner. Which American company? Oh, no, it was British. Of course Boeing was the biggest player in the period he describes, but there were plenty of others. (There were even a couple of other US manufacturers. Remember Lockheed?) Could I just point out also who made the only supersonic airliner flying back then. And come to think of it, the only one to fly ever since. The UK and France. And what did the US contribute to this amazing advance? They tied it up with red tape and objections so it was almost impossible to fly it.

This really made me angry, I’m afraid. In another article, Tyson tells off a judge for inaccuracy because he referred to 1,700 milligrams rather than 1.7 grams. Okay, it wasn’t a particularly sensible convention, but at least it wasn’t wrong. Saying ‘all planes were (US) Boeings’ is just factual inaccuracy to put across your political position. A book on space travel must cover politics, but once it is so hugely politically biased towards one country, however significant it may have been to the aerospace business, it loses credibility. This isn’t a book about space science, it’s a rallying cry for Americans. That’s something that has its place. I’m not knocking America, and it’s good that Tyson is proud of his country. But a science book isn’t the place for such sentiments.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Hubble: the mirror on the universe – Robin Kerrod & Carole Stott ***

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I was asked to review this book as I also looked at a book with a scarily similar title, Hubble: window on the universe. Both are coffee table books that depend on pictures from the Hubble telescope for their appeal. Both have 224 pages of big colour pictures, using those stunning images that Hubble has provided over the years.

I can’t fault the image selection in either. Here, after a quick look at the telescope itself we progress through stars, stellar destruction, galaxies, the big bang, the solar system and planets. Of the two, the text is definitely better in this book, while the other title has the edge on the photos because of the sheer size of the book – 37×30 to this book’s 28×23. That extra size means that ‘window’ really wows you visually.

However the bigger pictures here are still stunning, and it is noticeably easier to hold. You can just about read this in your lap, where ‘window’ probably needs to be on a table to have a chance.

This is an excellent choice, and in its 2011 third edition the more up-to-date of the two. I also significantly preferred the text here. But this isn’t going to be the sort of book you read cover-to-cover, and as such, for the sheer scale of the photos, the other book just has the edge. And if you want a book that’s more manageable to read with a stronger concentration on the text, I’d probably recommend our editor’s Exploring the Universe instead. It doesn’t stop this being an excellent book, though – and this book would make a great present for anyone interested in astronomy.

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Review by Jo Reed

Spacecam – Terry Hope ****

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I love a good book of space pictures, but it’s a difficult balance. For a book to be readable it can’t be too big – yet you want the pictures to be as large as possible. Spacecam comes in at the bottom end of the compromise. It’s about the size of a trade paperback, but in landscape format, which helps with the pictures. I’d really like it to be a little bigger to get the full glory of these images, but it’s big enough that the shots can be quite stunning, while at the same time it is a manageable size.

Having said that it is surprisingly heavy as it packs in 256 glossy pages – a lot for a book like this. After a couple of pages of introduction, this is a picture book with captions, rather than a flowing text, which I don’t generally like, but the quality of the images and quite informative captions (packing a lot in at the price of pretty small text) make the best of the format.

There’s a good mix here. Lovely colour shots from the Apollo missions, excellent Hubble space shots, a good range of photos from planetary missions and a wide range of satellite shots of the Earth – because we shouldn’t forget that arguably the great successes of the space missions have been those that look back on our planet.

It’s always a difficult choice when doing this kind of book to decide on the design of the pages. I personally find the black backgrounds of many space photography books, including this one, a little oppressive – I prefer the crisp contrast of a light coloured page – but it’s bearable.

Whether we’re looking at collapsing ice-sheets, the scarily Lord of the Rings-like Cat’s Eye nebula or an Apollo astronaut collecting lunar samples, there’s a lot to enjoy here. I think inevitably this may work best as a dip-in book, the sort of thing you might keep in the loo, but having said that, I found it intriguing enough to go through it beginning to end on a train journey. All in all, a very good attempt at what is inevitably a difficult type of book to pull off.

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Review by Brian Clegg