What makes this book particularly interesting are the insights into the top secret, "black" programs that helped NASA during some tight spots in its history, and the background of some of the astronauts NASA took in from the Air Force's abandoned astronaut program. ( )

Too superficial (picks up on many technical issues but never goes into any detail) and needlessly sprinkled with hooks straight out of fiction (talking about style, not content), like jumping around chronologically. I would understand if this was the history of the construction of the M1 but you're writing about people going into space - how much more exciting do you need to make this? ( )

Although the subtitle of this book talks about the first flight of Columbia, the book doesn't come into it until in the last third or so. What this book did was to describe the routes taken to NASA by some of the astronauts who were involved in the United States Air Forces space flight and space station projects and knew about the Department of Defense satellite programmes. Once at NASA, those astronauts were deeply involved in the development of the space shuttle and were among crew members on the test missions with Enterprise and the first actual space shuttle missions. I barely knew anything about that side of US space flight, so it was new to me and therefore interesting. Similarly, while previous heat shield issues and satellite photography had come up in the content I've consumed on Columbia's later disaster, I didn't realise just how significantly they featured in the first mission. I found this this book engagingly written, if a tad long. ( )

This is a highly-detailed account of the first flight of NASA's Space Shuttle, starting from the moment in 1969 when NASA's Chief Engineer, Max Faget, called his team together a couple of months before Apollo 11's historic Moon landing to show them something he'd put together in his spare time: an ungainly-looking balsa-wood and paper model aeroplane that flew at a high angle of attack (the extent to which the nose is raised above the direction of flight), which Faget declared was going to be "the next generation of spacecraft". Twelve years later, that would translate into the Space Shuttle.

To tell the story, Rowland White recapitulates the early history of the US Air Force's involvement with spaceflight - the X-15 rocket plane that flew to the edge of space, and the abandoned plan for a small. orbital bombing craft, the X-20 Dyna-Soar. The Air Force then proposed a project known as the Manned Orbital Laboratory, or MOL. This highly secret project proposed to launch a manned spy satellite, whose crew would be capable of making intelligent decisions over what ground-based locations to photograph, as existing spy satellites would happily photograph the ground without anyone knowing if the target area was under cloud cover or not. Exposed film was then ejected in re-entry capsules, which were recovered in-flight by specialist retrieval squadrons flying modified C-130 Hercules aircraft. Recovering, processing and interpreting film could take days; the object of the MOL was to put the Mk.1 eyeball into the loop far earlier. The crew could ensure that photographs were taken under the best conditions, develop the film immediately, analyse and report back. If it was necessary for the pictures to be physically put into the hands of senior decision-takers, the crew could de-orbit and cut a lot of the guesswork out of recovery.

This plan was well advanced, to the point of flying a boilerplate prototype, mainly to examine whether the modified Gemini capsules, which had a hatch let into the heatshield to allow the crew to pass from the capsule into the MOL and back again, were safe to fly. (The answer was yes; the heat of re-entry effectively welded the hatch shut and airtight.) The project was all set for go-ahead when the earliest digital cameras became available for spy satellite use. Almost overnight, the MOL became obsolete, and the twelve astronauts who were slated to fly MOL missions found themselves completely sidelined. They couldn't go back to operational military flying because the very existence of the MOL and its replacements were highly classified and the risk of their revealing this should they fly into combat and be shot down and captured was too high.

Their salvation came with the Shuttle programme and the prospect it offered of regular flights to orbit. We now know this never happened to the hoped-for extent, but at the time this seemed as if this could be highly likely.

The story moves forward through the development of the Shuttle, first as concept and then as hardware. The MOL astronauts became involved in some of the technical details of development, especially in computing. Meanwhile, other problems were being explored, especially that of re-entry. Instead of a conventional heatshield, designed to be used once, the Shuttle required some means of allowing the spacecraft to withstand the extreme heat of re-entry and yet to allow it to be serviced, launched and re-used time after time, safely and effectively.

It is now a matter of history that the solution, ceramic heat-resistant tiles, were problematical - not so much the tiles themselves as their method of attachment to the Shuttle Orbiter. On its first flight, a number of tiles became detached from the fuselage; the question was, whether any had become detached from the underside of the Orbiter itself, which the crew were unable to observe.

White brings out the value of the MOL connection. The Air Force had allowed the use of its surveillance technology to image Skylab I a number of years earlier; circumstance and political change put a senior executive from the highly-secret National Reconnaissance Office into NASA at the right time to offer help, in the knowledge that he could work with former MOL pilots in the Houston Mission Control team and so offer help from highly-classified intelligence assets that only former MOL crews had clearance to even know about the existence of.

Of course, there is much more to tell about the Shuttle, and White succeeds in doing this without making it dry or over-complex. For a 400-page book, this is a pretty quick read, though some have said that the book rather glosses over the contribution of many NASA workers and contractors outside of the astronaut corps; though he does give proper space to the deaths of Rockwell technicians John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole from nitrogen asphyxiation whilst carrying out tests on the Shuttle whilst it stood on the pad waiting for launch. Certainly, such was the complexity of the Shuttle (both in its technology and the politics surrounding it) that the reader should expect some simplification of the story. (After all, the official NASA history of the programme does run to two volumes.)

The first flight itself takes up the last third of the book, and we are shown many of those people who supported the mission, including the MOL pilots who flew the NASA T-38 chase planes. We are also given an account of the issues that occurred on that mission, including the revelation that after re-entry, the Shuttle came close to disaster when hot plasma got into one of the landing wheel bays.

White finally gives us a postscript which carries on to look at the way the Shuttle failed to achieve its objective of being a cheap, frequent way of getting payloads into space, and then finally touches on the accidents to Challenger in 1986, and to Columbia (the first Orbiter to fly to space) in 2003. An examination of those accidents is beyond the scope of the book; White rather chooses to show how the MOL astronauts were involved in those accidents and their reactions to them. He sets that epilogue against the proposal to commission a Shuttle launch facility on the West Coast of the USA at Vandenberg AFB in California, and shows how it was mothballed and never used.

Certainly, White's telling of the political story is kept as simple as possible, and shows how coincidence worked in the Shuttle's favour, and inter-service rivalry played its part. Ultimately, the Space Shuttle didn't achieve its highly ambitious aims, but it remained a technical tour-de-force (the two losses not being down to any defect in the design concept itself) and will probably represent the high point of NASA's technological achievements for many years to come.

For the dedicated enthusiast. I'm not so interested in the Space Shuttle program, but White still tells a good story. He is completely uncritical of NASA and the program, however. In his eyes, NASA can do wrong. He does not mention any of the big management failures leading to the Challenger disaster, and skips over the program's failure to achieve affordable space access, or anything particularly significant. Boondoggle though it may have been, it was still a cool spaceship, and White engagingly tells the story of its development, testing, and first mission to orbit. ( )