Everything You Know About Space is Wrong

Matt Brown Batsford £9.99 HB

If a book promising that it “boldly goes where no nitpicker has gone before” appeals to you, then Matt Brown’s latest offering will not disappoint. Everything You Know About Space is

Wrong is delightfully humorous and scientifically accurate in its space pedantry.

The book sets out to right inaccuracies and misconceptions about space partly as a “springboard to higher things”, pledging fun along the way. Brown’s lively style and choice selection of factoids and anecdotes fully delivers. Who knew the myth of the Great Wall of China being the only human construction visible from space dates back to the writings of 17th century English antiquarian William Stukeley? Or that the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, will be the first human to leave our Solar System and reach interstellar space? A sample of his ashes is aboard NASA’s New Horizons probe, which is currently somewhere deep in the Kuiper Belt.

Brown also includes some cheeky toilet humour, which will no doubt delight younger readers. Apparently 96 plastic bags of poo, or ‘defecation collection devices’, were left behind on the Moon by Apollo astronauts. Then there’s an hilarious ‘whodunnit’ moment from a NASA transcript of the astronauts aboard Apollo 10 discussing an escaped floating number two. Even the most serious reader may have difficulty keeping a straight face at astronaut Tom Stafford’s defence statement: “Mine was a little more sticky than that.”

For the space literate, everything you know about space may not be wrong at all. That said, already knowing your space myths from space facts will not detract from a thoroughly enjoyable read. SHAONI BHATTACHARYA is a science writer and journalist