The best books on aviation and space history

Margot Lee Shetterly’s account of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Christine Darden, and the other Black female mathematicians and engineers at what is now the NASA Langley Research Center is phenomenal. The 2016 movie was important in reaching a wide audience but didn’t do the story justice. Shetterly’s epic narrative spans the Second World War to the Apollo missions and interweaves the personal and the technical with the wider Civil Rights movement and the Cold War. I’m hard-pressed to cite my favorite part of the book, but one story moved me deeply. Upon winning the 1960 Virginia Peninsula Soap Box Derby, Mary Jackson’s son Levi Jr. was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied, “I want to be an engineer like my mother.”

Joe Sutter was the chief engineer of the iconic Boeing 747, leading a skilled team of engineers and technicians known reverentially as “The Incredibles” that developed the revolutionary airliner in just twenty-nine months from initial drawings to roll out. In many ways, Sutter’s memoir is a requiem for a bygone era in commercial aviation. Serving on the Presidential commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, Sutter faulted the safety culture at NASA and contrasted it to the policy of Boeing at the time which considered government certification requirements as only the minimum acceptable safety standards and not design goals. If you want your heart broken, read Sutter’s book and then read Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison.

Thread of the Silkworm is the definitive English-language biography of Hsue-Shen Tsien (Qián Xuésēn, 钱学森), a Chinese-born aeronautical engineer who made fundamental contributions to the early American space program including work with Theodore von Kármán and Frank Malina on establishing what is now the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Based on unproven allegations of being a Communist, the U.S. Government in 1955 deported Tsien back to China where to this day he is revered as the father of the modern Chinese space and military rocket programs (including the Silkworm anti-ship missile referenced in the title). Chang’s book was the source of much of my research for the alternate history story “The Son of Heaven” in my own collection.

A Man on the Moon is the best history of the Apollo program that I have ever read. Chaikin writes with the authority of an historian and the heart of a poet. The missions and the astronauts are brought vividly to life, and their adventures are recounted in loving detail. Several times over the course of my undergraduate engineering studies when things got tough, I would take A Man on the Moon out of the engineering library and it would never fail to inspire me. The book formed the basis for the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon and also inspired elements of two stories in my short fiction collection, “From a Stone” and the title story “Just Like Being There”.

This book recounts the remarkable life of one of my childhood heroes, the Canadian aviation pioneer Grant McConachie. Much of McConachie’s early career was spent as a bush pilot flying aircraft in the service of communities in Northern Canada. His exploits would make a fine Hollywood movie: A daring rescue of two brothers in northern Alberta burned by an exploding stove, making the first commercial flight over the Rocky Mountains from Calgary to Vancouver, becoming the president of Canadian Pacific Airlines at the age of thirty-seven, and even a memorable encounter with General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan. A fictionalized Grant McConachie appears in the alternate history story “The Coming Age of the Jet” in my own collection.