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The Giant Leap - Caleb Scharf ****

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines. In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier, but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading.

Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment).

Although there is plenty of content, this side of the book occasionally lacks storytelling nouse. For instance, when describing the hilarious way that the New York Times (incorrectly) laid into rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, accusing him amongst other things of lacking 'the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools'. This demands a quote, but Scharf just says 'Famously, in 1920, an article was published in which Goddard speculated on one day reaching the Moon, a New York Times editorial publicly and disparagingly dismissed his ideas about rockets working in space,' before going on to the Times' much later retraction. It's a bit like explaining a joke without ever telling it.

The other aspect of the book, linked by a common thread of the story of Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle, is more about the future of humanity and how it is linked to our ability to boldly go and so forth. This is fine, though it can feel a little vague when put alongside the more factual aspects. And while it's true that extremely long term we either leave the Earth or the species will perish, I can't help but feel that on the timescale where we have concerns, our species would no longer exist in any recognisable form - we've only been around a couple of hundred thousand years, where this is a billion years away.

One small moan - I'm all in favour of stressing the amazing contributions made by the likes of Emmy Noether to the development of mathematics and physics, but from reading this book, you might think that no one apart from Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and Noether really thought about anything relevant to space travel between Newton and Tsiolkovsky (apart from a few small contributions from the likes of Leibniz and Laplace). It's essential to tell us about women of science, but it should be in a more realistic context.

Overall, for me the whole concept of the need for 'Dispersal' (with a slightly pretentious capital letter) is perhaps driven more by Star Trek fun than any real view of the future. Is it really true that 'life is busy making its transition to being interplanetary right now'? I suspect human space travel will remain a niche activity with far less impact than probes and satellites helping us on Earth for many lifetimes to come. Nonetheless, it's an interesting and distinctly different book that deserves to do well. Recommended.

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