Do you want to know a frankly unnecessary amount about ballistic missiles? If so, this book is for you.
This book truly shines when it's talking about the pre-Apollo era. V2 rockets up through Gemini, that's where it's really good; according to the introductory material, the Iron Curtain had just recently fallen, and a whole treasure trove of Soviet records were suddenly available for the author to draw on. So he did, and magnificently so; I learned a lot.
From Apollo onward, however, the book is mostly just okay. He doesn't spend nearly as much time on Apollo itself as I would like -- he didn't mention the moon buggies at all -- and the rest of the book is somewhat tainted by the author's lack of distance from events. I did learn some interesting things about the development of communications satellites, though.
This author seems to have something against the Space Shuttle. He spends a lot of time complaining about how it was expensive and impractical and how it was just a Thing NASA Wants To Do So All Its Employees Can Stay Employed.
He also doesn't like the idea of space stations, and thinks that this proposed "International Space Station" thing will never happen. (Did I mention this book was written in 1997?) And I do understand his points that there's really no commercially viable reason to send people, rather than robots, into space, but I will also present a counterpoint: sending people into space is really awesome. I think the author here has lost sight of that factor.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft E10+ for some descriptions of space disasters like Apollo 1.
4 stars. Despite the disappointing last third, the first two thirds of this book are very good.
(Endnote: Not to be confused with Countdown by Deborah Wiles, which is historical slice-of-life about kids during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
It's always fun to read through something written with extreme confidence saying XYZ will not happen or ABC will happen -- and living farther along in history so you know what actually did occur.
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