THE chief engineers of the American and Soviet space programmes, Wernher von
Braun and Sergei Korolev, are dead. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is
dead. John Glenn, the first American in orbit, is 76 years old.

If we want eye-witness reports of the early days of the space age, it is
almost too late.

Helen Gavaghan’s Something New Under the Sun recognises this, and
provides first-hand descriptions of space developments. In the preface, she
outlines the limits of the book: it describes only the efforts of groups within
the US, and it confines itself to the early days of applications satellites.

We are provided with an account of the first navigation satellites, mainly as
seen by those at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University who
developed the Transit satellite system. Key scientists, including Bill Guier and
George Weiffenbach, contribute experiences and recollections of their late
leaders, Frank McClure and Richard Kershner.

The section on the first meteorological satellites is shorter and less
detailed, and draws heavily upon interviews with Dave Johnson and with the late
Verner Suomi, a fascinating individual who deserves a full-length biography.
Development was an uphill battle, and not just because of technological
problems. The potential of weather satellites, like that of navigation
satellites, was disputed or dismissed by leading experts prior to —and
sometimes even after—launch.

In the third section Gavaghan provides a fascinating account of the first
communications satellites, and the mighty tussle between AT&T’s Bell Labs
and the Hughes Aircraft Company. John Pierce and Harold Rosen, described by
Arthur C. Clarke as the twin fathers of communications satellites, both tell
their stories. The government’s support of the Hughes effort seemed to owe as
much to AT&T’s successful but politically unwise move to claim credit for
Telstar, at the expense of NASA, as to any technical questions.

Each story is clearly told, but let me mention some irritating features. We
were promised applications, but the author nowhere mentions Earth resources
satellites. The tortured history of American efforts in that field deserve to be
chronicled and could easily have been included by dropping material unrelated to
the main theme. For example, having stated that there will be nothing in the
book about satellites developed outside the US, Gavaghan devotes most of the
first few chapters to the early days of the Soviet space programme. It is an
interesting story, but one that has been told in more detail elsewhere (for
instance, in the works of James Oberg).

There are 53 pages of notes and sources, but they are not always linked to
the text. This makes it difficult to determine sources.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is frequently alluded to as the successor
to the Transit navigation satellites, but it is nowhere fully defined. Worse,
what little is said about it is not accurate. For instance, the book refers to
the “radar imaging technique” of GPS, but these satellites are not imaging
systems.

Despite my complaints, I found this a gripping read. As Suomi remarked, “How
hard we worked!” Having read Gavaghan’s book, you can believe it, of him and all
the other pioneers. To fight their way through technical, budgetary and
bureaucratic obstacles, and to produce the prototypes of satellites we take for
granted today, the scientists and engineers needed superhuman dedication. It is
fitting that their efforts be acknowledged, admired and recorded for
posterity.

A COVER featuring famous person not known as a writer (in big letters) and
lesser-known writer (in smaller letters) is not a promising start.

Don’t worry. The famous name is Buzz Aldrin, who as well as being the second
human to set foot on the Moon has a first-rate scientific training and broad
technical interests. The second name, John Barnes, is a formidable figure
in his
own right, whose Mother of Storms was perhaps the best science fiction
novel of 1994.

The book they have produced tells the story of a doomed species on a planet
in the Alpha Centauri system. About to be wiped out by a series of comets
heading their way, the inhabitants attempt to establish a colony on Earth. They
arrive at the dawn of human history. Although they stay here for several
generations, and also on the Moon and Mars, their colony ultimately fails.

The story is an interweaving of alien presence in our own past with a
description of our future in space and the search for the technology of the
vanished aliens. The text is full of precise and persuasive technical detail.
The discussion of scale height and the Martian atmosphere, for example, is as
lucid and concise as you could ask from a textbook.

There are occasional technical glitches. The collinear Lagrange libration
points are stated to be points of stable gravitational equilibrium,
whereas this
is true only for the triangular points. Fred Hoyle is oddly confused with Fred
Whipple.

These are minor quibbles. A bigger problem was the highly non-alien
nature of
the aliens. They have pyramid sales schemes, their computers are uncannily
similar to ours, and their young are even given homework. The thought patterns
are those of late 20th-century America, and the whole society is less
alien than
Europe of two hundred years ago, or New Guinea today. It is as though the
authors didn’t care to tackle the tough problem of truly alien aliens, more
different from us than oysters.

This did not spoil my enjoyment, and should not obscure my main point. It’s
good science fiction—full of bright ideas, where science and technology
are treated with care, detail and loving respect. On today’s book racks, that
makes this book a rarity. Surrounded by movie and TV spin-offs, bloated
multi-volume fantasies, sword and sorcery game books, Encounter with
Tiber towers like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

Eric Burgess has been reaching for the Moon for more years than the
average reader of this review has been alive. He was one of the early members
of the British Interplanetary Society, joining before the Second World
War, and has thought and written about space ever since. He is a man of
great enthusiasm for his subject, and one of the most qualified people in
the world to write about lunar exploration and possible colonisation. If
he cannot persuade us that a new lunar exploration programme is both important
and timely, perhaps no one can.

Outpost on Apollo’s Moon follows a logical course. First, it covers
the early days, when anyone talking of reaching the Moon or even flying
beyond Earth’s atmosphere was regarded as an obvious eccentric. There are
facts in abundance here: about the Moon itself and its composition, about
its origin and geology, and about its exploration from Earth. I found the
early history of lunar mapping, and the subsequent explosion of knowledge
provided by Lunar Orbiter and various Apollo missions, particularly interesting.

The Apollo programme, although it figures in the title, is itself dealt
with rather briefly. As Burgess remarks, it has been described well elsewhere,
in such books as Charles Murray’s and Catherine Bly Cox’s Apollo: The Race
to the Moon. Short des-criptions are given here of each Apollo flight from
Mission 8 onwards, but they minimise the problems that made certain lunar
expeditions into real cliffhangers.

The second half of the book begins with a thorough examination of what
we have learned about the Moon from the Apollo programme, as opposed to
a discussion of the programme itself. The picture that emerges is grim,
if unsurprising. The Moon is an airless wilderness of great extremes of
temperature, a barren world of deficiencies and excess; no air or water,
but lots of dust and an abundance of hard solar radiation.

Burgess emphasises the point, however inadvertently: ‘There are exotic
materials that if present on the Moon would considerably assist obtaining
funding for a return. Foremost is water’ This is a perfectly accurate statement.
On the Moon, water is an exotic material in very short supply.

Despite the harsh environment, humans can undoubtedly survive on the
Moon for long periods in suitably equipped bases. The rest of the book is
devoted to the description of such outposts, including everything from
construction materials and power sources to the inhabitants’ diet. To his
credit, Burgess does not, as others have done, paint the Moon as a panacea
for supplying materials to Earth orbit. He points out, correctly, that
such an idea is a long way from realisation even when and if we have a permanent
outpost on the Moon.

Occasionally he stretches an argument a little too far to make a point.
His suggestion that the technology required on the Moon may not be that
of the industrial nations created in my mind an improbable image of lunar
explorers crouched around a cooking fire. Similarly, his invocation of the
possible destruction of Earth’s biosphere by asteroidal impact, which he
then offers as a major motivation for creating a lunar base to permit survival
of our species, goes too far for me. It sounds like the space-age version
of Pascal’s wager. (He suggested that it is rational to act as if God exists
to avoid even the smallest probability that you will end up suffering endlessly
in hell; the advantages of behaving as if God did not exist were not worthwhile.)

Burgess has strong views and occasionally preaches, particularly when
it come to military expenditure and the military mind, versus money for
space exploration. He sees space exploration problems stemming from arms
race competition for funds. It is rather difficult to support that point
of view today, when the arms race is effectively over, and money for space
is harder than ever to come by.

All these points can be regarded as quibbles. The central question is,
do Burgess’s arguments persuade us? Do they inspire?

Ultimately, they do not, but the reason why is rather subtle. The book
is well-researched, complete and clearly, if not poetically, written. It
defines in detail the past and possible future of lunar exploration. Unfortunately,
Burgess makes it apparent that the future began in 1973, the year of the
last manned mission to the Moon. Until that time real work of exploration
was being performed. Since then there has been no shortage of paper studies
if anything, too many of them but no programme.

It is difficult to see that situation changing in the near future. Apollo
was a purely political initiative, having nothing to do with human interest
in space exploration. When the space race was ‘won’, the US promptly put
civilian space activities on the back burner, where is sits today. Burgess
assumes the availability of space station Freedom for building a lunar outpost,
and that is less and less a safe assumption.

Even though I enjoyed the work greatly, the final message of the book
is depressing. I was left with the feeling that everything would have been
believable if it had been published 20 years earlier. Today there is a
feeling that we have ‘done the Moon’. As a colleague of Burgess since the
1930s, Arthur Clarke, has remarked the Moon is an offshore island of Earth.
The real New-found-land of the Solar System will be Mars. However, the
motivation to send humans to Mars is presently lacking.

The spirit of enthusiasm for space exploration now seems to lie mostly
with Burgess and his fellow pioneers from the first days of space exploration.
It has not been handed on to the following generations.

I regret that this is the case; but until the world changes, old men
will be dreaming young men’s dreams.

Charles Sheffield is a Chief ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ of Earth Satellite Corporation
and a pasr president of the American Astronautical Society.

Any biographer of Arthur Clarke faces special problems. On the one hand,
Clarke is the acknowledged father of communications satellites, a man who
has been a visionary and a seminal figure in space development since the
late 1930s. On the other hand, he is the world’s best-known living science-fiction
writer, with publications in that field stretching back to the mid-1940s.
He has remained continuously active in both areas and the biographer must
do justice to both, together with their major personalities and their interplay.

When I read this book those facts were very much on my mind, together
with one that appeared the moment after I agreed to write this review. I
am not one of Clarke’s closest friends, but we have written to each other
pretty regularly since the late 1970s. I did not relish the thought of being
forced to write a negative review.

Fortunately, I do not have to do so. Neil McAleer’s biography is thoroughly
workmanlike, and from a factual point of view remarkably complete. There
are really only two ways to tackle a life of Clarke: either one can seek
to describe the scientist and the fiction writer separately, or one can
treat the two as intimately interwoven. McAleer sensibly chooses the latter
course, proceeding chronologically through Clarke’s life. The single exception
is a brief obituary that Clarke wrote for his long-time friend and rival,
Isaac Asimov. Since Asimov died only in April, this material must have been
interpolated at a late stage, when the book was probably already at the
printers.

The first 30 pages or so of the book are actually the least interesting,
detailing as they do an unremarkable childhood. However, the book picks
up pace with Clarke’s move to London at the age of 19, and thereafter is
continuously fascinating.

All the major elements of Clarke’s life are described. The famous memorandum
and article of 1945, in which Clarke laid out the general principles governing
geosynchronous communications satellites, and foresaw the use of these orbital
locations for Earth observation; his disastrous marriage to Marilyn Torgenson,
in 1953, which led to one of literature’s great dedications – ‘. . . to
Marilyn who spent the advance before I got to Chapter 2’; his first visit
the next year to Ceylon (Sri Lanka); and his decision in 1956 to live there
permanently. That move was less smooth than it appeared from outside, because
until 1975 the tax laws effectively required Clarke to be absent from the
country for half of each year.

By far the most interesting part of the book is Clarke’s famous collaboration
with Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is also, not
coincidentally, the place where we are given the clearest view of Clarke,
the man, with his own personal problems and needs. Despite Clarke’s genial
and congenial personality, both he and Kubrick had definite views about
their own competence and worth (an American physician who conducted medical
tests on Clarke in 1986 characterised him perfectly as ‘a curious combination
of modesty and the opposite’). However, this was a collaboration in which
Clarke did not have control. The final say on the movie was Kubrick’s,
who also delayed release of the associated book at a time when Clarke was
flat broke and borrowing money to stay afloat.

The period was obviously an absolute torment for Clarke, who had always
been self-employed and the master of his own fate. It is significant that
in later collaborations, including the recent ones with Gentry Lee, Clarke
has been the undisputed senior partner. When Kubrick late in 1989 suggested,
probably in jest, that Clarke had some spare time and should come in and
work with him, Clarke just laughed; but I wonder what he thought.

After 2001 appeared, we see Clarke’s steady increase in fame and influence.
Financial problems are now presumably something far in his past. But perhaps
because success is less interesting than failure, and wealth less interesting
than a struggle against poverty, McAleer never again achieves the intensity
of the Kubrick episode.

The book contains occasional errors (Hugh Downs is stated to be the
president of the National Space Society, when two other individuals named
in the book – Ben Bova and Charles Walker – succeeded him years ago in that
position). But the inaccuracies are few and minor. My principal criticism
is more fundamental, and may be inevitable for any authorised biography.
McAleer presents all the facts, but he avoids any deep discussion of Clarke’s
emotional side. He does this quite deliberately, and he warns the reader
at the outset of his intentions: ‘. . . this writer never probed too deeply
into Clarke’s private affairs. I no more wanted to describe intimate details
of a living man’s private life (assuming the information was available)
than he or his contemporaries wanted to read about them.’

The result of taking this approach is sometimes a strange feeling of
distance, almost like reading the biography of a dead person, although Clarke
is alive, well and very active, with his 75th birthday recently celebrated
in England (prematurely; Clarke shares his birthday with Beethoven, 16
December, but he said in a letter earlier this year that he wouldn’t go
to England in winter, so he would have his birthday celebration early).

The detached tone of the biography is present despite contemporary interviews
and recent events. However, McAleer mentions that Clarke has kept a private
diary since December, 1938. It runs right up to the present, and contains
four to five million words. Those journals were not available to McAleer,
and Clarke says that they will not be looked at until 50 years after his
death.

McAleer worked with what he had, and manages very well without the diaries.
The book is full, well-researched and well-organised. But it is impossible
not to speculate on those 30 volumes, locked away according to Clarke in
‘a little iron box’; and one can’t help wondering what very different sort
of biography might have been written with their help.

Charles Sheffield is a past president of the American Astronautical
Society and of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

SINCE 1958, the American scientific exploration of space by unmanned
spacecraft has enjoyed a curious love-hate relationship with the manned
space programme, from Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo on through to the Space
Shuttle and the proposed space station.

On the one hand, science has benefited and still benefits from the development
of powerful launch vehicles, guidance and control systems, and communications
equipment. On the other hand, space science usually feels like the Cinderella
of NASA. It makes do with a small fraction of the manned programme’s budget,
it rarely has first call on resources and when cuts have to be made, science
usually feels the knife first.

Bruce Murray is a professor at the California Institute of Technology,
former director of the Jet Propulsion Lab, and a founder of the Planetary
Society. He has been at the centre of the American space science programme
for almost 30 years. This book recounts that programme’s main triumphs,
from the Mariner Mars flybys and probes, on through the Mariner and Pioneer
encounters with Venus and Mercury, and the Viking Mars orbiter and lander.
The high point of these efforts, the centrepiece of the past 20 years and
one of the most extraordinary sagas of exploration ever, is the Voyager-1
and Voyager-2 combined encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,
a ‘Grand Tour’ of the outer solar system for which Voyager may have been
designed, but for which it was never intended (at the time of launch, the
approved and budgeted encounters ended at Saturn).

Murray makes it clear that there were many more technological cliffhangers
in these efforts than the public would ever see. And in presenting the triumphs,
he does also throw in a liberal dose of his own frustrations.

His views on the manned versus unmanned question are quite clear. Despite
the title, this book is the story of unmanned exploration. In Murray’s eyes,
the manned programme was always the bully, doing just what it liked. It
was NASA’s god, and dozens of valuable science projects were sacrificed
on its altar, often after extraordinary design efforts had already been
completed. In some cases, notably the Giotto mission to Halley’s comet and
the solar polar spacecraft, international cooperation with Europe was promised,
and then reneged on.

It is hard not to feel sympathetic with Murray’s point of view, even
if at times one thinks of the fly on the axle of the moving chariot, looking
around and remarking on the fine dust it is kicking up. For it is an undeniable
fact, however distasteful, that the unmanned spacecraft of the US would
not have reached their present sophistication, and in most cases would never
have existed, without the excitement and drive provided by the manned efforts.

There is a strange irony in the way that Murray’s own writing makes
this very point. The technical problems that he describes are always interesting,
but they are not exciting. Only when he describes the events that surrounded
the Challenger accident, or when he tells of Washington’s promises, evasions,
and betrayals, does the tension rise and the story become truly gripping.

Part of the reason for that rise in intensity level is Murray’s considerable
talent for one-line personal description. Obviously out to tell the truth
as he sees it, rather than to win friends, he economically skewers people
both inside and outside NASA. So, James Beggs, a former head of NASA and
a man whom Murray obviously likes, ‘underneath all the charm and goodwill,
is a ‘company man’.’ From Murray, that is not a compliment. (He also has
good things to say about Beggs, and rightly considers Beggs’ forced resignation
from NASA on bogus charges by the US Department of Justice as a national
disgrace.) Robert Frosch, another former NASA administrator, ‘has the air
of a detached intellectual. He delights in abstract discourse’. From a doer
like Murray, that too is not intended as a compliment. Andy Stofan, who
ran the Office of Space Science and Applications, is ‘a highly capable engineer,
(who) understood means better than ends.’ Jimmy Carter was ‘too honest to
mislead but too narrow to lead’, which may be as good a capsule description
of that president as we will ever have.

By contrast, all the working scientists in the book fare very well.
And if Murray thinks rather better of Caltech and JPL scientists than of
anyone else, that is natural and defensible.

Murray saves his strongest criticism not for any individual, but for
the whole Space Shuttle project. He considers its inadequate design and
insatiable demand for new funds, added to NASA management’s self-serving
decision to kill the expendable launch vehicle programme in order to force
all users towards the Shuttle, as the twin forces that in the 1970s and
1980s crippled and almost destroyed the US’s science activities in space.
Regrettably, it is hard to dis agree with a word of Murray’s condemnation.

In the final section of this book, he schemes and dreams of an international
cooperative exploration of the planet Mars. It is a fine vision. But if
today that vision seems closer than it could have seemed two or three years
ago, it makes another point even more strongly: it is the vast political
changes in the Eastern Bloc, operating independent of science’s hopes and
wishes, that will finally grant or frustrate the scientists’ dreams. Space
science proposes, but politics still disposes.

Charles Sheffield is chief scientist at Earthsat Corporation.

SUPPOSE that some future system of transport allowed humans to travel from the Earth to the Moon in one minute. That same system would need 190 years to carry its crew to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) and it would take millennia to reach Vega, or Canopus, or Betelgeuse. The closest stars are 10 000 times as far away than the most distant planets of our Solar System, and not one of them is known to possess a planetary retinue ofits own.

These simple facts have led many people to argue that travel to the stars is impossible, if not preposterous to think about. Any book which makes theopposite case, and holds as its thesis the reality of interstellar travel, must grapple with the problem of immense distances, and must posit either very high speeds (a substantial fraction of the speed of light) or travel times of centuries or more.

Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff make no attempt to minimise the difficulties. They define the technical problems to be solved, and then examine the technology available to solve them. When even the bestattempt of today’s science falls short of success, they state that fact explicitly; and they also assess the potential of future developments.

The central problem of interstellar travel, and one thatdeservedly occupies over half of the book’s pages, is propulsion. As the authors remark: ‘Propulsion, propulsion, propulsion’ might well be the interstellar explorer’s equivalent of the estate agent’s exhortation of ‘location, location, location’. Following a brief review of the extreme distances involved in flight to even the nearest stars, Mallove and Matloff begin a systematic survey of any and every method that might beused to propel a ship, with orwithout a crew, through interstellar space.

They begin with the familiar tool of chemical rockets, recognise it at once as hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand, and move on to more advanced ideas: electric propulsion, fission and fusion rockets, pulsed propulsion, matter/mirror/matter propulsion, beamed energy propulsion, light sails, Lorentz force turning and several varieties of ramjet. Mallove and Matloff provide only a few pages of description for each of these but the excellent references allow anyone to go back to source materials for more details.

It is giving away no secrets to reveal that every method the authors considered for interstellar travel is either well beyond today’s technology and energy budget or involves many centuries of travel. Recognising this, they are quite willing in the later chapters of the book to admit speculation on exotic physics (vacuum energy drives, worm-holes and gravity machines) and biology (suspended animation and hibernation) that may someday come to the aid of the interstellar spaceship designer. These ideas are clearly, and appropriately, labelled as something between fact and fancy.

Less speculative chapters round out the work on the interstellar medium (even ’empty’ space is not quite empty), interstellar navigation problems, techniques employed in the search for planets orbiting other stars, and – the most optimistic section – a list of useful things to do while you are on a long interstellar journey.

The final result is probably as complete and plausible a book as can be written today, on a theme whose practical implementation is surely a century or more away. However, the work is not without flaw and errors. The idea of placing the more technical material and all the mathematics in Technical Notes, as inserts to the main text, is a good one, but its value is diminished by some sloppiness in setting and checking equations, so that here and there lower case is confused with upper case, signs are reversed, dots to denote derivatives are omitted, and occasionally an equation is simply wrong.

Some of the Technical Notes, such as those on the calculus of variations and the Viking Lander life-detection apparatus, add nothing to the book. The ‘explanation’ of the Twin Paradox offered in an appendix is no more than a description of that paradox, likely to leave the reader more confused than ever. Occasionally, the authors repeat material, sometimes inconsistently with its first appearance. They understate the role to be played by computers very much. A century from now computers should be of unrecognisable power and sophistication. And on a less technical front, admirers of Tennyson will be surprised to see a famous passage from Locksley Hall attributed to that poet’s Ulysses.

These criticisms are intended more for revision of the second edition (which I hope will occur) than to disparage the contribution made by this book. For although in a conventional didactic text such errors of editing or presentation would be damning, the true value of this text, I suggest, lies more in its vision than in the manner of its presentation.

Before any subject can be developed in detail, it first needs to be recognised as a subject. The biggest service performed by Mallove and Matloff is to take interstellar travel seriously, as a matter worthy of systematic study and of hard and detailed thought. The book is clearly a labour of love, undertaken with expectation of little reward beyond the intellectual one, and it contains the results of years of effort.

The authors have read widely and selected well. The volume is certainly packed with intriguing ideas and useful information. But a generation from now, those thoughts and facts will surely be less relevant than the work’s serious intent,its broad perspective and trail-blazing character.

Charles Sheffield is chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation.

THIS IS a book that repays the persistent reader. Its subject is the
physiology and performance of humans in space, and it is organised in three
main sections: first, an introduction concerning the nature of space, with
an overview of the world’s manned space programmes; second, the problems
of putting humans into space for short periods, and returning them to Earth;
and finally, the problems of living in space for long periods.

Unfortunately, the opening section, where the author is not writing
about space medicine, but rather about physics or celestial mechanics, is
by far the least satisfying. It may put some readers off completely, and
that would be a pity.

The problems are small, but they are frequent enough to be irritating.
There are misspellings scattered throughout the book: for example, of Vladimir
Komarov, the first Soviet astronaut to die in space and of Ellison Onizuka,
one of the Americans lost on the Challenger spacecraft. There are several
factual errors: the orbital period of a spacecraft at an altitude of 125
miles is not two hours, it is a little less than one and a half hours; the
decrease in air density with height is not the result of solar heating nor
is it the effect of decreasing gravity. Neutrons are not ‘a potential source
of great biological risk . . . because such neutrons are unstable’, but
because of their interaction with body tissues. A free neutron certainly
does not ‘decay into a proton and a neutron’. And the opening sentence of
the whole book, ‘Space is the ultimate hostile environment’, is very debatable.
The surface of Venus, or the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seem far less
benign for the presence of humans. Fortunately, Harding, who is a specialist
in aviation and space medicine, hits his stride in Part Two. He divides
the problem of moving to space and of functioning there into five main parts:
the effect of changes in pressure and density, the effects of both increased
and decreased acceleration, protection from radiation and meteoroids, control
of temperature and humidity, and the less life-threatening but no less important
questions of nutrition, personal hygiene, selection and training, and general
health care. These variables are related to six main classes of physiological
function: neuro-vestibular, cardiovascular, fluids and electrolytes, haematology,
musculoskeletal, and central nervous system.

This sounds like a mouthful, and the medical discussion, drawing freely
and knowledgeably on both Soviet and American experience, does become highly
detailed. Along the way, however, the book poses and answers questions that
anyone who has wondered about the dangers of going to space, or of living
there, must have asked.

How long would a person live, suddenly exposed to a vacuum? Would human
blood boil, in that situation? How high an acceleration can a person stand
without blacking out? How much shielding is needed on a spacecraft, to provide
the same protection as our own atmosphere at sea level? Exposed to vacuum,
a human becomes unconscious in 15 to 20 seconds and dies in about four minutes.
Human blood would boil above 63 000 feet, where the saturated vapour pressure
of water at body termperature equals the total atmospheric pressure, were
it not for the restraint offered by the skin. Untrained personnel become
unconscious when acceleration exceeds 5G, although volunteers (possessed,
presumably, of a certain element of masochism) have endured over 40G for
short periods without permanent ill-effects. A layer of water 10 metres
deep offers the same overall protection to radiation as the Earth’s atmosphere.

These simple-minded answers are available in the text, but it slights
Harding’s discussion to suggest that the short answers are all there is.
The author provides a full discussion of the experiments that lead to these
conclusions, of the ways in which harmful effects can be mitigated, and
of the parameters that control variability in human responses.

The analysis embodies available medical data, through late 1988, and
yet it becomes clear that such data are far from complete. Occasionally
the reader finds an intriguing passage that cries out for more detail, only
to realise that such detail is simply not available: ‘the immunological
response of white blood cells . . . was inhibited in microgravity . . .
bacterial cell proliferation was increased . . . their resistance to antiboitics
was enhanced’. Do bacteria find the microgravity environment more acceptable
than humans? The third section of the book concerns long-term human habitation
of space. It is less definitive, understandably, because, although there
have been Soviet cosmonauts in space continuously for many months, we still
lack an adequate base of experience. The full story is not yet in on loss
of body calcium, maintenance through exercise of muscular strength, and
many other physiological and psychological factors. However, Harding offers
an impressive list of a dozen existing spin-offs from space medicine to
terrestrial medicine. Each one of these, ranging from noninvasive monitoring
of body functions to recorders and analysers of eye movement, is far more
impressive than the famous (or infamous) example of Teflon.

I have other minor criticisms. Harding is unduly fond of acronyms. A
list of 76 of them is given at the beginning of the book, but the reader
often feels that far more than that are being used. Occasionally, an acronym
is more confusing than useful, as in the case of IR to mean ‘ionising radiation’
rather than the familiar ‘infrared’. And to add to the confusion, ‘radiation’
is used here principally when the author means particles. The assertion
that the largest meteoroid to hit Skylab was 4 to 8 inches in diameter is,
to this reader at least, not at all credible. Impact with something that
size would have destroyed Skylab.

And Harding’s habit of explaining technical terms by giving a more familiar
equivalent word in brackets is often useful, but does the reader need to
be told, for example, that ‘initial’ means ‘starting’? To summarise, this
is a work with some irritating flaws. On the whole, however, the interest
of the material more than outweighs the defects. This book is, to my knowledge,
the only one of its kind. It is a serious and successful attempt to bring
the technical medical problems of space travel to a general audience. As
such it is sometimes irritating, often fascinating, occasionally tough,
but ultimately rewarding reading.

Charles Sheffield is chief scientist at Earthsat Corporation, Bethseda,
Maryland.

FROM 1957 until 1980, Martin Gardner’s monthly column on mathematical
games was a stable and staple feature of Scientific American. It was the
place in the periodical that many of us turned to first, and Gardner was
a primary focal point and clearing house for the world’s recreational mathematics.
Anyone who had an interesting problem or a curious result tended to write
to him, because his interests were wide-ranging, his knowledge encyclopedic,
and his energy unflagging.

Thus the news, in 1980, that Gardner would retire from Scientific American
came as a shock far worse to many of us than such trivia as the fall of
governments. The pain was only partly alleviated by the knowledge that Douglas
Hofstadter would take over, with a rather different focus, and that the
two men would alternate columns during 1981.

The task of producing an interesting and fresh column every month is
a monstrous one; Hofstadter, highly qualified for such a task, said as much
in 1985 in his own book, Metamagical Themas (an anagram of ‘Mathematical
Games’, and part of Hofstadter’s own homage to Gardner). After a year and
a half, Hofstadter began to wonder how long he could sustain the production
of monthly articles without jeopardising his other work. It is a miracle
that Gardner was able to continue at a high level for so many years, while
finding time to write his own nonmathematical books and to edit and annotate
such works as Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Through The Looking Glass,
and C. C. Bombaugh’s Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature.

One way Gardner did it was by taking a very broad view of the definition
of a ‘mathematical game’. With his editor’s blessing, the column could be
pretty much anything that Gardner found intellectually stimulating. Fortunately,
Gardner had insatiable curiosity, and he never lacked for an interesting
subject.

Over the years, several collections have been produced of those monthly
articles. Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers is another such, with recent
additions and updates to almost all of the columns.

The scope is extraordinary. Gardner’s discussions range from tutorial,
almost historical, reviews of negative numbers and properties of the conic
sections, to analysis of the classic problems of Sam Loyd, and on to more
recent results on ‘unbreakable’ ciphers, Roger Penrose’s aperiodic tiling
of the plane, John Horton Conway’s general theory of games, problems in
Ramsey graphs, and Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Scattered in with these
are articles on card tricks, chessboard problems, Raymond Smullyan’s fine-tuned
logic puzzles, and the truly amazing interlocking artforms of the Spanish
sculptor, Miguel Berrocal.

I did not find all the articles equally interesting. I suspect that
other people would not agree with my ranking, but at the top of the list
I place aperiodic plane tilings, the endlessly-fascinating Mandelbrot set,
the cutting of shapes into congruent parts (hard!), prime-number ciphers,
the Berrocal sculptures, and the Smullyan puzzles. Least interesting to
me were the two chapters on ‘The Oulipo,’ concerning literary wordplay.
Gardner’s interest in this is obvious, because the Bombaugh text I have
mentioned is full of literary curiosities; but I found such items as the
long, palindromic conversation between Adam and Eve, which is presumably
supposed to make sense, irresistibly reminiscent of the efforts of the lady
Baconian in the works of P. G. Wodehouse. I still can’t read that without
laughing aloud.

When it comes to proofs, diagrams, and presentation, Gardner is a perfectionist.
I found only one minor error in the book. On page 27, the text has ‘clockwise’
and ‘counterclockwise’ inverted relative to the figure (unless this is a
Carrollian world, where the hands stand still and the clock moves). All
the discussions have the characteristic Gardner economy and clarity, while
his unerring eye for the ‘interesting’ allows him to pick up early on new
subjects that, after their appearance in his columns, became major fields.
Thus the material has dated remarkably little.

This book, containing material scattered across a 25-year period, also
brought to life for me long-dormant personal memories, of a young John Conway,
with a large turnip in one hand, a lethal-looking knife in the other, and
a demented grin on his face. Conway was demonstrating how the five Platonic
solids could be generated by sequential removal of excess turnip lumps.
The book also reminded me of a not-much-older Roger Penrose, giving a proof
of a theorem on conics with double contact that seemed more metaphysical
than mathematical, and pointing out to a largely-baffled audience that he
had employed only a degrees – of – freedom argument. I was also reminded
of a later Penrose, at dinner after a talk on twistors at the University
of Pennsylvania in 1973, quietly remarking that he had a new, interesting,
and non-periodic way of filling the plane, which he thought might have commercial
potential for things such as patterns and designs that could be used for
wallpapers.

Those fortunate enough to have encountered Gardner’s columns on their
original appearance can look for personal bonuses of reminiscence as they
read this book, as well as the pleasure of seeing the material in a convenient
collected form; but the greatest pleasure will probably come to those encountering
these works for the first time.

Gardner is one of history’s great figures of recreational mathematics.
It is good to have more of his work available in book form.

Charles Sheffield is a novelist and writer of short stories. He is also
chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation.