Haynes Manuals, ISBN 10: 0857333712
Now that people feel that they can’t mend their own cars, Haynes Manuals seem to be turning their attention to other modes of transport.
To begin with, we must get a few things under our belts, like Newton’s laws of motion, and the concepts of specific impulse and regressive burning, not to mention Imperial units – the book looks back to 1942, after all.
Then we can take off on a sumptuously illustrated journey through the history of rocketry, with photographs, diagrams and technical drawings of the innards and outgoings of everything from the V2 to Ariane 5.
Given that the author worked for NASA for 25 years and has written 90 books on spaceflight, we can expect a very informative ride. The book is a celebration of engineering, rather than a tale of astronautical skill and daring, and is thus a fascinating nuts-and-bolts complement to books such as Andrew Smith’s Moondust or Matthew Brezezinksi’s Red Moon Rising.
Baker’s introduction announces, with the welcome use of inverted commas, that his book “aims to open a window for the lay person on just what “rocket science” is all about, and hopefully to show that it is in fact founded on basic principles that govern ordinary events… in everyday life”.
It remains a mystery, of course, and one that Dr Baker makes no effort to explain, why all these engineers went to all that trouble just to pretend to send men to the Moon.
Paul Taylor
