Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986-2011 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S)
Leave aside debates about its costliness and riskiness. From an astronaut’s perspective, flying the space shuttle was a fantastic experience. This work, a set of accounts of those experiences, runs from the 1988 resumption of the shuttle missions after the Challenger explosion to the final one in 2011. Houston interviews many of the people who boarded a shuttle in this period; culls their ­memoirs, such as Jerry Linenger’s Off the Planet (2000); and details their career paths into the astronaut corps. A personal rather than technological portrait of the shuttle emerges, with astronauts’ feelings about their engagement with shuttle technology, rather than the technology itself, receiving primary emphasis. In the text, that engagement emerges in descriptions of training for complicated missions, such as those that kept the Hubble Space Shuttle in operation, and in reflections on the view of Earth from space. And since in these years rendezvous with space stations required training with cosmonauts, Houston’s interviewees express their attitudes about learning Russian and cooperating with their former space-race rivals. Providing vicarious access to astronauts, Houston will attract the spaceflight set. --Gilbert Taylor