Space Exploration

Royal Observatory Greenwich £9.99  PB

Space Exploration is a beautiful little book, furnishing its reader with a comprehensive overview of our millennia-old love affair with the cosmos. Penned by Royal Observatory Greenwich astronomer and educator Dhara Patel, its prose packs an appreciable punch of knowledge for its diminutive size, although conversely the narrative can often feel somewhat bland and clunky.

Patel traces humanity’s fascination with the sky from our earliest ancestors, through religion and astrology, to the dawn of modern scientific awareness. She guides us assuredly through key issues, concepts and questions and pays due deference to the towering figures of the past who shaped our comprehension of the Universe around us. She explores the history of space travel from its dawn to the present and offers a tantalising glimpse of the future. Her background and expertise in physics is reflected in the ease with which she explains the fundamentals of telescopes and eyepieces to the lay reader.

From time to time, Patel drops unexpectedly delightful anecdotes into her tale – from a young Wernher von Braun tying fireworks to a toy car, to the eerie solitude of Apollo 11’s Mike Collins in lunar orbit – but this does not always save the book from being stylistically mechanical in places. That said, Space Exploration does what it says on the tin: it treats its subject with the confidence and succinctness of an expert and Patel’s skill provides a good introduction to the subject for amateur and professional alike. ★★★★★

Ben Evans is the author of several books on human spaceflight and is a science and astronomy writer