Apollo: The lost and forgotten missions by D. Shayler and D. Lind, Springer-Verlag/Praxis, 拢24.50, ISBN 1852335750 Development of the Space Shuttle 1972-1981: History of the space shuttle, Volume 2 by T. A. Heppenheimer, Smithsonian Institution Press, 拢28.50, ISBN 1588340090 The Continuing Story of the International Space Station by Peter Bond, Springer-Verlag/Praxis, 拢19.50, ISBN 185233567X Reviewed by Stephen Baxter
IT鈥橲 July 1969. Apollo 11 has just had lift-off. An exuberant vice-president, Spiro Agnew, proclaims that the US 鈥渟hould articulate a simple, ambitious, optimistic goal of a manned flight to Mars by the end of the century鈥�. This was, after all, the original vision of rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, with Apollo a mere stepping stone. One intriguing question raises itself: what might have been?
David Shayler鈥檚 new book, based on an assiduous trawl through mission concepts surrounding Project Apollo, is a remarkable compendium of lost possibilities. From the outset there were plans to develop Apollo into various extended missions. In the end, of course, Apollo did achieve six landings on the Moon, and the hardware was used for Skylab and the experimental docking mission with a Soviet Union Soyuz in 1975.
Advertisement
But there should have been much more. We could have seen Apollos with six-people crews, astronauts equipped with personal lunar fliers, and teams working together to build the first lunar base. And looking even further ahead, multiple Saturn launches could have sent Apollo spaceships on fly-bys of Venus and Mars, as precursors of the full-scale assault on Mars that had been confidently predicted for the 1980s.
None of this came to pass. Shayler poignantly includes descriptions of the lost Apollo missions, cancelled before the end, as well as the planned moonwalks of Apollo 13 and the lost objectives of Apollo 1, destroyed by a catastrophic fire in January 1967.
Shayler鈥檚 book is a catalogue of possibilities rather than an analysis of why these options were never taken up. But in gathering this resource he has performed a service to future space historians as well as to space buffs. When researching my own counterfactual novel on NASA鈥檚 lost destiny I was frustrated by the difficulty of finding such material 鈥� and was startled, on visiting NASA, to find out how much even they had forgotten.
From lost dreams to gritty reality. T. A. Heppenheimer鈥檚 Development of the Space Shuttle 1972-1981 is the second volume of his monumental history of America鈥檚 space truck. It takes us from the first stable, if compromised, design concepts through to the relative triumph of the first flight. This is an authoritative and valuable work, but its story of budget fights and delays is frustrating.
Somewhat more uplifting is Peter Bond鈥檚 The Continuing Story of the International Space Station, a wide-ranging and generally enthusiastic survey of that immense, conflict-ridden project. 鈥淣ow, in the year 2002, the night sky has gained a new star,鈥� says Bond. Indeed, but how much more we might have achieved.