THE COMING OF THE SPACE AGE

On October 4, 1957, the rehearsal of a Philharmonic orchestra about to launch Peter and the Wolf suddenly stopped as its members quietly withdrew. They were from the Harvard and the Smithsonian Observatories and had just received the news that Sputnik I had been successfully launched...the Spage Age had begun. Mr. Clarke has compiled a number of articles, letters, reports, editorials, etc., recalling vivid moments in our space program from that moment when we were "caught with our antennas down" to tapes of John Glenn's high flying voice. Kurt Stehling does a beautiful job of recording the fiasco of Vanguard TV 3 while a further disastrous moment captures a cameraman risking almost certain death photographing an errant rocket. Dr. Wernher von Braun gives his personal history of the development of German rocketry while the three fathers of Astronautics contribute autobiographies. There is an analysis and comparison of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. programs with an emphasis on goals by White House Space Council Consultant Dr. Charles Sheldon and a number of speculative pieces on everything from possible commerce to alien life to a proposed track meet on the moon to religious implications to interstellar culture. Excitement inherent in the subject and the challenge of its concepts should appeal.