THE SPACE RACE

The story of space travel, from the birth of astronomy to the 21st-century’s flurry of Mars rovers.

Messner carries her tale from ancient Egypt through Sputnik, Apollo 11 (“That’s one small step for a man”), and the space shuttle program to the observation that even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, joint Russia/U.S. missions to the International Space Station continued. She also directs readers’ attention to Wernher von Braun, who went directly from using enslaved labor to construct rockets for the Nazis to heading this country’s early space program, as well as to NASA’s blatantly racist and sexist history. But she has relatively little to say about the Soviet space program: following accounts of how it put the first dog, artificial satellite, man, and woman into space, it then “lost much of its steam.” The book covers the Gemini and most of the Apollo flights in a similarly hurried fashion and neglects even to mention NASA’s ill-fated Pioneer programs except for a single entry in a closing timeline that, unlike the narrative, cuts off in 2015. Koch adds graphic panels to highlight select dramatic moments, but aside from that element and Messner’s efforts to smash a few myths, plenty of recent conventional histories cover similar ground. Final art not seen.

A useful, if unsystematic, tally of soaring achievements.