After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age

Edited by:
  • Martin Collins
Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins: 2007. 256 pp. $35.00.

Describing the era we live in today as the 'Space Age' has an uncomfortable, slightly bombastic feel to it. How quickly things change: even as a child growing up in the 1980s, I seem to remember the phrase being used as a tag with pretensions to historical validity, rather like 'Roman times' or 'the Victorian era'.

Then came space flight's loss of innocence in the 1986 Challenger disaster, and shortly after that, the end of the Cold War, which robbed the space race of much of its political rationale. Although After Sputnik provides an illuminating account of manned spaceflight right up to the present, its core harks back to a halcyon 'heroic age' of Gagarin and Glenn, and Armstrong and Aldrin. Its medium is artefacts from the collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, and attendant expository texts.

Understandably, the story thus told has an American bias. But it is a fascinating story nonetheless: starting with the thermos flask with which Robert H. Goddard first demonstrated the principle of liquid rocket-propellants in the 1920s, we pass by exhibits such as Soviet stamps commemorating Yuri Gagarin's first Earth orbit, the spacesuit worn by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 Moon mission, the carbon dioxide filters extemporized in mid-flight to save Apollo 13, and the massive hulk of NASA's first space shuttle, Enterprise.

But there's also the unexpected, the whimsical and the poignant. A tube of sour green cabbage soup provided a taste of home for Soviet astronauts of the 1960s. The pickled remains of Anita, an orb-weaver spider, are a testament to life's adaptability in space: after an initial short period of forgivable disorientation on a 1973 Skylab flight, she wove webs perfectly suited to microgravity, using silk 20 per cent finer than on Earth.

Last but not least, a couple of exhibits provide answers to that most trivial and yet most fundamental of questions — what do you do when you are caught short in space? Such gems are interspersed with cultural artefacts, from Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 and the like, to make for a satisfyingly rounded scientific and social history of the iconic race for space.