Skip to main content

The Spacefarer’s Handbook - Bergita and Urs Ganse ****

I can’t remember when a book exceeded my expectations quite as much as this one did. From the title, I was anticipating a Haynes-style manual packed with facts and figures but light on scientific insight. The assertion on the back cover that it ‘contains everything aspiring spacefarers need to know!’ (complete with exclamation mark) reinforces the idea that it’s a breezy and superficial book aimed at newcomers to the subject. I’ve already read so much in that vein I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new from it. Happily the book proved me wrong. Possibly as much as two thirds of the material was new to me – all of it fascinating stuff that is usually glossed over in popular-level accounts of human spaceflight.

The Ganses, who are siblings, are both space insiders, Bergita working in space medicine and Urs in space physics. So they’re eminently qualified, and they both have the knack of explaining their specialist subjects lucidly, without assuming prior knowledge on the reader’s part. The result is the polar opposite of a Haynes manual – a lot of insight, but relatively few facts and figures. The book is also surprisingly light on historical context. For example, we’re often told about specific events or issues associated with Apollo or Skylab in the 1970s, but not basic facts like what the spacecraft looked like, the size of the crew, the typical mission profile etc. That’s fine for aging nerds like me, who already know these things, but other readers may need occasional recourse to Google or Wikipedia. On the other hand, this does allow the book to focus on more substantial matters that can’t easily be found by googling.

The bulk of the book is divided into four long chapters, the first of them dealing with spacecraft design. This is the place to learn about everything from rocket engines and gyroscopes to carbon dioxide scrubbing, space toilets and Whipple shielding against micrometeoroids. Next comes ‘how to fly a spacecraft’, including both the physics of orbital manoeuvres and the engineering practicalities of thrusters and joysticks. Presumably these two chapters were written by the physicist half of the team, while the medical doctor was responsible for the two that follow.

Space medicine per se is dealt with in the last of the core chapters, and – speaking as someone who is usually too squeamish to read about medical matters – I found it surprisingly fascinating. It’s not so bad reading about ailments such as ‘puffy face and bird legs’, caused by changes in fluid balance in microgravity, or G-measles – tiny ruptures in blood vessels under high acceleration – when you’re not likely to get them sitting at home. Before that, there’s an equally eye-opening chapter on ‘daily life in space’ – ranging from minor irritations like mould forming on airing cupboards, or exhaled CO2 accumulating in a bubble in front of your face, to important activities like space walks and making coffee.

The book was originally published in German in 2017, then translated by the authors into English. If they hadn’t told me it was a translation in the preface, I don’t think I would have noticed... except perhaps for one thing. The word 'spacefarer' – which appears in the title, the back cover blurb (see my first paragraph above) and dozens of places in the main text – is clear enough in meaning, but sufficiently uncommon that my spellchecker doesn’t recognise it. To me it has a vaguely poetic – or possibly tongue-in-cheek – ring to it, which I’m sure the authors didn’t intend. It’s a literal translation of Raumfahrer, which is the standard German word for astronaut. I’m probably being over-fussy, but to me the more matter-of-fact ‘Astronaut’s Handbook’ would have been a better title than the whimsical-sounding ‘Spacefarer’s Handbook’.

That little quibble aside, there’s not much I can say about the book that’s negative. I can think of a few topics the authors missed out, but if they’d included them it would have made the book longer – and since I hate overlong books that would have been a problem in itself. As it is, the book strikes a happy medium between glossy Haynes-style offerings on the one hand, and plodding academic literature – which is the only other place you’ll find many of these topics discussed – on the other. As a final plus-point, the book has an affordable, far from academic-level price tag – so it’s highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the finer points of human spaceflight.


Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Andrew May

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...