<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Do not waste your time on this book.
Review: I would sincerely not recommend this book to anybody. First, it is very badly written and poorly structured. It contains a huge number of examples, that are very poorly used, and usually misplaced in the text. It is constantly skipping around from one topic to another, only to come back to the initial topic at a later time. Moreover, scientific explanations are often so wild that one wonders whether the author actually understands what he is talking about. Sometimes it is frankly comical: "The present generation of heat shields date back to the 1970s, when they were designed to protect spacecraft from overheating if they got too close to the sun". It reminds me of Icarus in Greek mythology, whose wax wings melted when he went too near to the sun. I also find it regretful that there is no consistency at all in units, making it impossible for the reader to get any real sense of scale. The reader is simply supposed to read and be impressed by the big numbers such as "billions of electron volts". Finally, I found this book very superficial. There are lots of examples, but there isn't much argumentation put around them. The reader is simply submerged with cases and left to sort things out for himself. The only point that I felt that the author was trying to make was how dangerous all this is. But this point is made more by the vocabulary than by argumentation. For example, he mentions that "(plasma clouds) strengthen the theory that there may be a new and menacing subatomic particle in existence". How can a subatomic particle be menacing? The idea is rather absurd. But from the word 'menacing', the layman is supposed to understand that this calls for fear. Overall, I think that this book would have much benefited from some proof reading. It may contain some valuable information, but given the number of inaccuracies I have seen, I mistrust all the content. The combination of bad writing, shaky content and lack of insight makes me wonder what there is to get out of this book. Reading it I felt like I was listening to a savant monkey repeating inaccurately what he has heard from his master.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Read This Book!
Review: If you want to know about space debris in particular and the space program in general PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!! There are 67 MAJOR errors in the first 100 pages dealing with the space program which could have been detected by anyone with the smallest familiarity with the space program. The editing and review of the book was also very sloppy with misspelled technical terms as well as organizational mistakes too numerous to mention. Examples of this inclue the National Research Council working for NASA, NORAD working for NASA, NASA working for US Space Command, and two different incorrect names for NORAD on the same page. Another major error identifies von Braun with the Vanguard rocket that exploded on its pad on Decwember 6, 1957. The Vanguard rocket DID NOT launch Explorer 1; it was launched by a Jupiter-C also known as Juno. Another claim is that the cosmonauts on Salyut 1 died after their 230-day mission in 1972; these cosmonauts perished after their 23-day mission in 1971. In yet another major error, the author claims that Plesetsk, the major Russian military launch facility is in the Arctic wastes of Kazakhstan; this site is in Russia; the author confused the Baikonur launch site located in the desert steppes of Kazakhstan with the Russian site of Plesetsk in the Arctic. In another major error the author claims sky watchers in the United States saw the NEAR spacecraft as it travelled over the South Pole in 1996 at 300 miles above the Earth. This is a physically impossible look angle, since people in the US would have to look through the earth to see anything in the skies above Antarctica. The book is full of these errors. Don't waste your money!
<< 1 >>
| 
