SPACE JOURNAL

Flights of fancy.

This lavishly illustrated book opens with a retraction. In 1920, the New York Times ran an editorial mocking rocket scientist Robert Goddard, who, in a footnote to “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” suggested that, for rockets, the sky was no longer the limit. The Times scoffed: Rockets can’t function in space because there’s “nothing to push against.” A half century later, with Apollo 11 en route to the Moon, the paper confessed its error. A correction to an editorial commenting on a footnote—that is the stuff of this wondrous book: the marginalia of space exploration, scraps, and oddities that reveal, in their hand-drawn doodles and torn edges, the larger story of humanity’s yearning for the stars. Campbell, a journalist, presents them with a collector’s passion: Galileo’s scrawled to-do list (pay debt to “Lord Manucci,” buy chickpeas), Newton’s plans for magic tricks (turn water into wine). “While space exploration relies on science and engineering,” Campbell writes, “the fuse is often lit by the artists and dreamers.” And sometimes, they’re one and the same, as we see in Somnium (Latin for dream or delusion), a 1634 sci-fi novel by the astronomer Johannes Kepler. You’d think this might be the earliest work of science fiction, but Campbell has a deeper cut: True History by Lucian of Samosata, written in the second century, about a sailing ship that ends up in a war on the moon. Campbell’s curation is illuminating. An Émile Bayard illustration of a splashdown from an 1874 edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon is displayed next to an uncannily similar 1969 photograph of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin bobbing in the Pacific beside the Apollo 11 Command Module. With text as engaging as the images, the book can be read cover to cover or dipped into as a cabinet of curiosities. Its charm falters slightly when Campbell writes about the present day, as if the whimsy of the past has given way to sober reality. In fact, as the book brilliantly demonstrates, space exploration is one whirling mix of fact and fantasy. That’s exactly why there are footprints on the Moon.

A treasure trove of space travel ephemera that illustrates the glorious feedback loop between story and science.