Description
Book SynopsisA captivating history of NASA’s Space Transportation System—the space shuttle—chronicling the inevitable failures of a doomed design.In
Dark Star, Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last fifty years, NASA’s space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the unique circumstances that led to the space shuttle’s creation by the administration of President Richard Nixon in 1972 and its subsequent flights from 1981 through 2011, Hersch illustrates how the space shuttle was doomed from the start.
While most historians have accepted the view that the space shuttle’s fatal accidents—including the 1986
Challenger
