Mission to Mars : : my Vision for Space Exploration.

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Call Number: 629.442 Al
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	629.442 Al	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Includes index.
Buzz Aldrin speaks out as a vital advocate for the continuing quest to push the boundaries of the universe as we know it. As a pioneering astronaut who first set foot on the moon during mankind's first landing of Apollo 11-- and as an aerospace engineer who designed an orbital rendezvous technique critical to future planetary landings -- Aldrin has a vision, and in this book he plots out the path he proposes, taking humans to Mars by 2035.

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Interesting, but Uneven submitted by Jan Wolter on July 7, 2013, 4:14pm As a kid, I was fascinated by the Apollo missions and I assumed that we would naturally continue to explore space. It didn't work out that way, and I lost the sense that space exploration was really something that we needed to invest a lot in.

So here's Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, to share his vision of why America should set it's sights on Mars, and how it should be done.

I ended up thinking that this book doesn't make the best possible case for his vision. I really disliked the introductory chapters, which seemed to assume that you knew a lot about space technology, while telling you things that people how know a lot about space technology already know. It seemed to me that Mr. Aldrin wasn't sure if this book was supposed to be convincing other space buffs that Aldrin's blueprint for Mars colonization is the right one, or whether it was supposed to be convincing the general public that the overall goal was a worthy and feasible one. Later chapters got better and I learned a lot I didn't know, and heard some arguments that made some sense.

I don't think he convinced me that we need to go to Mars, but I think he did convince me that one of the preliminary steps on his agenda, sending a manned mission to a near-earth asteroid, is a sound one, half for the scientific value, half for the general development of useful space capability, half because someday we may need to prevent one of those asteroids from hitting the Earth, and learning how to reach them and deal with them would be a good thing. Since that's three halves, I figure that's a pretty good deal.

Mr. Aldrin seems to have a third kind of audience in mind - whoever gets elected to the presidency in 2016, because he wants that person to make a commitment to establishing a permanent colony on the moon. As inspiration, he provides an appendix outlining the contributions of each president since Kennedy to the American space program, with the full texts of their major speeches on the subject.

On the whole, however, I think most non-president readers would prefer a book that was either more technical or less technical.