The most recommended NASA books

Many heroic characters are not flashy. This is the way I like to cast them in my novels. The principal characters in this fast-moving SiFi novel are that way. The story is revealed using a first-person approach, each chapter being in the voice of a particular character. I like the breezy nature of the dialog that allows emotional depth to gradually make an impact without getting bogged down in psychoanalysis. While the earth is frosting over with a new ice age and civilization grinds towards an uncertain future, national alliances are forming with the associated grasping and competition for limited resources. A genius scientist is tasked to find an answer and the author rightly avoids a deep dive, instead taking broad leaps across technological chasms. However, this novel gets you thinking about what you might do under similar circumstances.

By now, nearly everyone has seen Apollo 13, the movie based on this gripping account by the mission’s commander. The book delves into both the events themselves and the background of the mission in ways a movie cannot, including an unlikely event during the spacecraft’s assembly, which ultimately led to the oxygen tank explosion.

Of all the hard-charging, high-achieving astronauts, Mr. Lovell was perhaps the most “normal” of the group, which I think is illustrated by the fact that he was one of the few to get through the Apollo program with his marriage intact. His humanity, intelligence, and determination shine forth in this account, illustrating what it took to survive their ordeal.

“Every day brought a challenge for young Lonnie Johnson—the challenge of finding space for his stuff.” This beginning (along with Don Tate’s kid-friendly illustrations) drew me in, but the young inventor has more serious challenges on the way, including racism and other roadblocks. My favorite moment in this true story is when Lonnie takes a test that tells him he lacks the aptitude to be an engineer, even though he’s already built his own working robot—in the 1960s! I hope kids who love to tinker will get the message not to let anyone else decide for them what they are smart enough to do.

Boothman is not a well known author but he should be. Stormy Weather is a collection of short stories and musings that cover a wide range of genres.

I love the unexpected twists, the great variety and above all the humor, sometimes slapstick, sometimes exquisitely dry, and always uniquely Boothman. These stories include a psychic detective, a mysterious TV channel leading into a disturbing world, a nameless assassin who does the right thing when others can’t, a strange artifact on a distant asteroid, and a series of “news snippets”, including Nasa Captures Shots of Happy Face on Sun. There is literally never a dull moment in this book.

Smale is a fantastic award-winning writer of alternate history, and in Hot Moon we get to see that skill combined with his day job as astrophysicist for NASA. But above all this is an action story of the Cold War turning “hot” on the moon.

There are other alternate Apollo tales (e.g., For All Mankind), but I don’t know of any that have this level of space combat. Smale’s sprezzatura with the scientific details is such that I was never pushed out of the story by their complexity or by doubt in their correctness.

And like all of Smale’s work, Hot Moon never loses track of the importance of the “who” experiences technological change versus the change itself.

I’m looking forward to the next book in this series!

In contrast to Marooned (and, in fact, just about every other SF space novel of the ’60s and ’70s) is this short and very dark masterpiece. The first winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, this novel about the aftermath of a doomed mission to Venus is Malzberg’s dark answer to the over-optimistic view of space exploration that was prevalent in the post-Apollo period, and a stark reminder that the universe is an unforgiving and dangerous place.

Most space adventures for middle grade readers are totally sci-fi fantasies, but this one is so realistic and well-researched, it’s like a genre of its own. The main character, Fin, is 12 years old and he’s surrounded by other brilliant kids who are part of the StellarKid Project for young inventors. They all have the opportunity to go to space with NASA, but someone is trying to sabotage them. It takes a lot of brain power for the kids to save themselves when everything goes wrong in orbit, but even more than that, it takes teamwork, which requires each of them to face their fears. I felt like I was holding my breath for the entire second half of the book, so you know I was into it.

This is the fascinating personal account, by physics Nobel laureate Mather, of the discovery with NASA’s COBE satellite, of the tiny variations in intensity over the sky (“ripples”) of the microwave background radiation of the universe. This background radiation originates from the time when the universe first became transparent, about 380 000 years after the Big Bang. 

Theorists had predicted that this radiation may hold information on density fluctuations in the first fraction of a second of the expanding hot universe. Mather and his colleagues succeeded in detecting the predicted very small intensity variations, which earned him and his colleague George Smoot the Nobel Prize. These “ripples” are the seeds for the formation of the presently observed structures in the universe.

The book is very well written and is wonderful reading for everyone interested in the origin and evolution of the universe and in how great scientific discoveries are made.

From the time he was young, Edward White loved outer space and dreamed of traveling there. In simple poetic language, this book tells how Edward’s life led him to serve in the U.S. Air Force and ultimately in the NASA program, where he became the first American to walk in space. Nonetheless, the book emphasizes that while he was always reluctant to stop doing anything related to outer space, he was eager to return from his journey to spend time with his greatest treasure of all—his family! Back matter gives more details about White’s life and a timeline of his accomplishments.

This is a children’s version of the book that inspired the movie.

Like everyone else who saw that movie, I was blown away by the story – I was also thoroughly ashamed that I hadn’t heard about these amazing women before.

I’m no math whizz, so making all those impossibly complicated calculations – on which people’s lives would depend – is already completely beyond me. But doing so with such dignity and determination in the face of the daily grind of petty prejudice and poisonous ignorance puts them in the superhero category.

I was in tears in the movie, and once again when reading the book.