The Mission

David W Brown Custom House £25 ● HB

Written in a smooth, fluid style that offers a tip of the hat to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, this beautiful book is a gem of an introduction to our Solar System and how, over decades, human minds and robotic spacecraft have learned more about it. The book particularly emphasises our decades-in-the-making desire and drive to visit Jupiter’s ocean-bearing moon Europa, a potential candidate for past microbial life.

Freelance writer David W Brown, whose pen has seen service for The New York Times and Scientific American, introduces us to a knot of men and women from quite different backgrounds. His biographical sketches offer wit and humour in equal measure as we are guided through their respective careers which settled, often unexpectedly, upon the disciplines of astronomy, geology or planetary science.

Notably, we meet Robert Pappalardo, whose childhood trip to see a solar eclipse led him eventually to involvement in the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, an Optimus Prime of a spacecraft that threatened to bankrupt NASA’s space science budget. We meet ex-ring-binder saleswoman Louise Prockter, whose muddle through life – and having a combination of engineer/biology teacher parents – created a desire to explore worlds beyond her own. And we meet Ed Weiler, whose first task when put in charge of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program was… to cancel the Mars Exploration Program and start with a clean sheet of paper.

Brown’s prose is refreshing and demonstrates his credentials as a superb wordsmith, handling complex issues of science, technology and politics with stylistic flair. ★★★★★