The Earth Gazers

Christopher Potter, Central 629.45 P866e 2018

My subjects, but this book was not written for readers like me. The author sums up his approach in a note following the bibliography:

• "This is not an an academic work; it is meant to be a narrative built on the expertise of others. In that spirit I have decided not to source every last quotation."

Ahem. The author is now free to make stuff up, and he seems to. The typos and grammar mistakes and lack of acknowledgements suggest a solo effort, with little professional editing or proofreading.

• p75 "When he was 15, von Braun (15th birthday April 1927) ... Wanting to know more, he sent off for a copy of Oberth's The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. He was disappointed to find the book was densely written and full of mathematical equations. Mathematics and physics were two subjects he had no interest in. It was at that moment that Wernher realized that his passion for rockets exceeded his loathing of maths and physics."

  • Vivid writing, but what was the source??? Did von Braun actually say that, especially the strong words and the radical mental shifts? This may be POMA included for drama, not data.

• p179 "Four months later (1960), the American spy satellite Discoverer 14, orbiting at an altitude of 100 miles, took photographs of the Earth that were the first to be developed from film."

  • according to http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1960-010A (copy at Internet Archive) the orbit was 116 to 508 miles. That is a very low perigee and a quickly decaying orbit; 100 miles would decay much faster.

  • These were the first images from orbit returned on film, but not the first film images from space. In 1946, a V2 launched a movie camera to 65 miles (104 km, above the Karman line) and the film was recovered after impact.