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Infinity Beckoned illuminates a critical period of space history
when humans dared an expansive leap into the inner solar system.
With an irreverent and engaging style, Jay Gallentine conveys the
trials and triumphs of the people on the ground who conceived and
engineered the missions that put robotic spacecraft on the heavenly
bodies nearest our own. These dedicated space pioneers include such
individuals as Soviet Russia's director of planetary missions, who
hated his job but kept at it for fifteen years, enduring a paranoid
bureaucracy where even the copy machines were strictly regulated.
Based on numerous interviews, Gallentine delivers a rich variety of
stories involving the men and women, American and Russian,
responsible for such groundbreaking endeavors as the Mars Viking
missions of the 1970s and the Soviet Venera flights to Venus in the
1980s. From the dreamers responsible for the Venus landing who
discovered that dropping down through heavy clouds of sulfuric acid
and 900-degree heat was best accomplished by surfing to the
five-man teams puppeteering the Soviet moon rovers from a
top-secret, off-the-map town without a name, the people who come to
life in these pages persevered in often trying, thankless
circumstances. Their legacy is our better understanding of our own
planet and our place in the cosmos. Purchase the audio edition.
Ambassadors from Earth reminds us that our first mad scrambles to
reach orbit, the moon, and the planets were littered with enough
histrionics and cliff-hanging turmoil to rival the most far-out
sci-fi film. But it all really happened! Drawing on original
interviews with key players and bolstered by previously unpublished
photographs, journal excerpts, and primary source documents, Jay
Gallentine delivers a quirky and unforgettable look at the lives
and legacy of the people who conceived, built, and guided our first
unmanned spacecraft and planetary probes. From the Sputnik and
Explorer satellites of the late 1950s, to the thrilling Voyager
"Grand Tour" of the '70s and '80s, they yielded some of the most
celebrated successes and spectacular failures of the space age.
Confessed one participant, "We were making it up as we went along."
Gallentine fearlessly clambers to the bottom of a surprisingly
bitter controversy over who first developed the technique of using
gravity to steer a spacecraft. Also of special note are his candid
discussions with James Van Allen, the discoverer of the rings of
planetary radiation that now bear his name.
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