A System of Many Moons

Journey Beyond Selene: Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System (Jeffrey Kluger).

I started reading this book a few years ago. One of these days I'll have to write my essay on books that are projects, as this book became a project. It sparked my interest (again) in the early US space program, and led me to looking up and reading several other related books. I finally realized (!) that I never finished the book that started the trail to lunar geology, so pulled it down from the shelf and started it again.

Jeffrey Kluger is probably known to you, if at all, as the guy who has the name in little type on the book Apollo 13 (co-written with that Jim Lovell fellow). Here he gets to shine on his own, and a fine job he does!

Journey Beyond Selene, to me, should have been several books. Kluger wants to show us what an interesting place our solar system is beyond the planets, what fascinating places all the moons are. And, he wants to profile the people who have explored those moons. So we have an outline on the Ranger program (and if you think the folks launching the space shuttle are frustrated today, wait until you read about that program!) but we skip over Surveyor and Orbiter (and the book was really too early for many details on Clementine or the Lunar Prospector). We then jump to Apollo 15 and a very nice summary of what was learned between the unmanned and manned programs as to how our Moon was formed. The book profiles the first lunar explorer, Galileo Galilei, one of the first (if not the first) to turn a telescope towards our Moon and the man who found the four major satellites of the planet Jupiter (and incidentally, who would probably have discovered the rings of Saturn as well, if they had been aligned a little more favorably at that time!).

The final (and largest) portion of the book explores the various missions (proposed and not flown as well as those that flew) that brought us the first views of the outer planets of the solar system and their fleets of moons. From Pioneer 10 and 11 to Voyager 1 and 2, as well as a look forward (at the time the book was written) to the (cancelled but superseded) Pluto-Kuiper Express, Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn.

Kluger does a great job of giving background, profiling some of the more interesting personalities involved, as well as many of the issues (funding, science, politics) involved in the missions. He also excels at running the gamut from the big picture (how the moons of a planet were formed or came from) to the individual picture (the moments of serendipity...usually involving members of the navigation team...that lead to discoveries such as new moons or the volcanic system of Jupiter's moon Io).

Excellent book all around, if too short. Way too short. I hope he returns to these subjects someday. His brief chapter on Apollo 15 made me want to see a whole Apollo book from him. The outline of the Ranger missions made me wish to see a similar amount of detail on Surveyor and Orbiter.