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Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. One by one these
long-sought jewels have revealed their mysteries through the brilliance of American
space science. And in August 1989, as it sweeps by Neptune, Voyager 2 will
complete America's pioneering exploration of the solar system, a journey of stirring
robotic discovery begun in the confrontation of the cold war and ended in the
glow of glasnost. The distance we have travelled in only
thirty years -- from the outer edge of Earth's atmosphere to the outer edge of
the solar system -- is one of the great sagas of human history, a story of promise
and frustration, of grand success and tragic failure, of science and politics.
and for the last decade and a half it has been the story of a nation lost in space,
as the leaders of NASA doggedly pursued a flawed Shuttle program to its disasterous
collapse on January 28, 1986. Now, while the Russians surge ahead and europe has
matured to an independent force in space, U.S. space achievements still slip into
the future, victims of a bureaucratic obsession with means rather than ends.
Bruce Murray, director of the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory
from 1976 to 1982 and a space scientist for thirty years, is uniquely qualified
to tell these stories of triumph and tragedy. In Pasadena as in Washington, fighting
always for an imaginative view of human outreach, Bruce Murray has advocated planetary
exploration as a grand cultural chievement for the United States and the world.
Mixing an insider's knowledge of NASA infighting and the often blind politics
of space with a scientist's sure-handed command of technical intricacy, Murray
tells the riveting history of our rise and decline in space and lays out a new
approach -- to Mars with the Russians -- that can lead us back to greatness.
Bruce Murray, who holds a Ph.D. in geology from M.I.T., served
in the Air Force when the first satellies were launched before going to Caltech
in 1960. Soon afterward, with a chance to work with the 200-inch telescope at
Mt. Palomar, he fell in love with space and was determined to be a part of the
space exploration team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Caltech-affiliated
space facility. Years later, Murray became the director of JPL and therefore a
major player in the science and politics of space for six years. Nowadays, Murray
continues with NASA and JPL Mars planning and science and has pioneered new relationships
with the Russian space program. Murray, who teaches at Caltech, lives in Pasadena
with his wife and the youngest of his five children. |
