Review by Choice Review
The original Mercury Seven astronauts were instant celebrities, worshiped by the public as brave American heroes. Hersch (Univ. of Pennsylvania) considers these original astronauts from the late 1950s and brings the story up to the beginning of the space shuttle era in the 1980s. The author describes NASA's internal conflict between engineering and science, which was reflected in the views of NASA's astronaut-pilots compared to its astronaut-scientists. The former group looked down on the latter, and the astronaut-pilots were prominent in the Apollo program (1967-75) and even through Skylab (1973-1979). The conflicts often involved selecting individuals for the coveted spaceflight assignments, with astronaut-pilots who controlled the missions making the decisions. While astronauts had inordinate power within NASA due to their public roles, their prominence was attenuated after Apollo. By the time of the space shuttle era, NASA's astronaut population was much more diverse: women and minorities became part of the corps, and many more PhD-level scientists became mission-specialist astronauts. Though the author writes in a scholarly manner with a heavy dose of footnotes, the text is very accessible to laypersons and enjoyable to read. The book is factually accurate, well organized in a chronological manner, and includes some nice halftone photographs. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general audiences. J. Z. Kiss University of Mississippi
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
