Trailblazing Mars – NASA’s Next Giant Leap by Pat Duggins; University Press of Florida; Gainesville, Florida; $24.95 (hard cover); 2010.
The distant reddish hue of Mars in the night sky is a magnet for exploration. Eye-catching glimpses of the red planet were first done through telescopes, followed by robotic spacecraft that flew by, orbited, landed upon…yes, even crashed on that enigmatic world.
This book is well written and keeps the fire of exploration going, looking out to the day when humans will make the trailblazing trek to Mars.
What Duggins chronicles is the long, steady, and hard-won progress attained by NASA over the decades. That legacy of leadership has been underscored by success as well as, sadly, loss of life. Both robotic missions to Mars and the evolving human spaceflight program are blended throughout the volume.
The reader will better appreciate the new and daunting challenges that await human expeditions to Mars. There’s a thought-provoking chapter on should NASA go it alone? Similarly, Duggins grapples with the big question: Why go at all?
“After decades of relative comfort of flights in low Earth orbit or on brief trips to the Moon, NASA and the American public will enter the ‘big leagues’ of space travel, assuming a manned Mars mission is ever attempted,” the author explains.
The message of this book, at least to this reader, is that Mars is surely NASA’s next giant leap – and not taking that bounding step would mean squandering a heritage of space exploration and discovery – fueled by human ingenuity and curiosity.
For more information on this book, go to:
http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=DUGGI002
By Leonard David