Looking Beyond

Gr 4–6—These overviews will provide middle grade readers with sketchy but coherent pictures of space exploration's rapidly receding past as well as glimpses of its potential futures. Looking Beyond is a general history of the universe since the Big Bang, with a discussion of how we study exoplanets, speculations about interstellar expeditions, and information on permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars. Closer to home, Parker points out that Soyuz spacecrafts, originally designed for Moon flights in the 1960s, are still flying to the International Space Station. In Parker's view, the Soviet space program never really recovered from its "Moon Fiasco." Consequently, he focuses here largely on NASA programs and particularly its triumphs—from Mercury to the space shuttle in Space Pioneers and Race to the Moon and on the Explorer I to the New Horizons craft in Probes. Not that he's uncritical; though disasters such as the Apollo I fire or the Challenger explosion rate but bare acknowledgements, he notes the astronomical cost of each space shuttle launch ($1.3 billion) and ends Satellites with a chart that includes an average unit cost for each type of satellite (hint: they're not cheap). Small photographs, photorealistic renderings, and cutaway views of high-tech spacecraft illustrate the white-on-black mix of captions and short bursts of narrative text. Each volume ends with a summary chart—of space "firsts" in Space Pioneers, for instance, and an annotated list of manned and unmanned lunar missions in Race to the Moon—though none suggest leads to further resources.