I love space. Space missions, thinking about other planets/worlds/alien life. It's all so cool to me. I also read a huge amount, primarily science fiction and fantasy. One thing I get less of though is non-fiction, and from time to time I try to fix that.

[b:The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission|22571516|The Interstellar Age Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission|Jim Bell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1404484684l/22571516._SX50_.jpg|42038013] is a great way to change that. (That's quite the title).



In a nutshell, it's a story of the Voyager missions, going into background years (centuries) before they were even launched up through each of the fly-bys, and into a more than decent sprinkling of the human side of the story.

There are some wonderful scientific tidbits in there that I half knew but really liked getting numbers for.

I work with computer hardware and software day in and out, so seeing just how underpowered Voyager was compared to modern devices? Awesome.

Learning about how they reprogrammed it and added compression remotely (about as remotely as has ever been done...) to better change in software what hardware couldn't change? Awesome.

Realizing that these are human devices mind numbingly far away from us... and yet we can still talk to them and get data back? Awesome.

The human half of the story... I'm still not sure what to think about it. It ends up being rather more personal, with the author's tangential involvement taking up a lot of the story. And... I didn't always care about it. Get me back to the technology and SCIENCE! But really, without the human part of it, we never would have had this mission. We never would have had this book. So for that at least, it makes it work.

All together, it's a wonderful story and a well written book. Well worth the read. ( )

A fine read. Wsa hoping for more about the spacecraft and how it worked. Some interesting nuggets about the planets and the flyby on the Grand Tour. Much of this info had already been shared, so it was a recap. ( )

Epic voyage, epic accomplishments.

Bell does a good job presenting the decades long epic accomplishments of the Voyager mission - a fascinating exploration of our entry into the interstellar community! ( )

In The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission, Jim Bell tells the story of NASA’s Voyagers 1 and 2, from the original realization that a rare planetary alignment would allow a Grand Tour of the outer solar system through their current work mapping the boundary between the sun’s influence and interstellar space. As awe-inspiring as the information Voyager is, Bell humanizes his narrative by focusing on the lives and work of those involved in the project in one form or another over its 40-year history. He focuses on how they organized their lives around the planetary fly-bys and how they inscribed their hopes and dreams onto Voyager 1 and 2, literally in the case of the Golden Record. Discussing the differences between the period in which Voyager launched and now, Bell writes of New Horizons (which flew-by Pluto in 2015), “It was launched without an interstellar message like Voyager’s on board. Perhaps this is a sign of a more anxious age” (pg. 97). In this, Bell examines the shifting national mood since the 1970s and new concerns about possible contact with extraterrestrial life based on our own history, such as the encounters between the Old World and the New. In turning to follow-up missions like Galileo and Cassini, which expanded upon the Voyager mission’s data from Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, Bell argues that both Uranus and Neptune deserve follow-up as they each only received a single fly-by and the most recent information comes at a distance from Earth-based observatories. He writes, “In the Interstellar Age, we know that to truly get to know a place, you’ve got to spend real time there, among the locals, learning their strange, alien ways” (pg. 189). Both NASA aficionados and those studying the history of space flight will find Bell’s work a valuable addition to their bookshelves. ( )

Some good info on the Voyager missions. Didn't especially care for the author's style, but it didn't detract too much. ( )