Big Dish: Building America's Deep Space Connection to the Planets (review)

Books that deal with space history and cosmology are rapidly increasing in number, sophistication, and beauty—as befits the exploding accumulation of space data. Four hundred years ago, Galileo opened the eyes of mankind to new objects in our solar system. Almost fifty years ago the first beeps from Sputnik heralded a space age that would soon expose mankind to a plethora of information garnered by instruments launched into the solar system. Our knowledge has expanded and our lives have changed.

The success of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) lunar and planetary exploration programs, prompted by the need to counter the Soviet Union's challenge to technological supremacy in space, had been made possible by the creation of telecommunications links with spacecraft. These links are provided by the big dishes of the NASA/JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Deep Space Network (DSN). Engineer-historian Douglas J. Mudgway published a history of the DSN for the NASA History Series: Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network, 1957– 1997 (2001). Big Dish is a different story, focused on the giant radio antennas and on "the unique group of men that conceived and created them" (p. 13). It is not about the NASA and JPL administrators at the top of the organizational charts but rather the "hands-on" people at the lower tiers, the project managers and technical specialists, people who performed under extraordinary constraints of schedule and budget.

Planets have their own schedules, not subject to negotiation. Planetary spacecraft have no value if signals cannot be transmitted or received precisely over distances of hundreds of millions of miles or be filtered out of the ubiquitous cosmic noise. Cold war priorities notwithstanding, the funding of the deep-space telecommunications network was always at risk. First things first; rockets had to leave Earth on time, and laboratory-precision space instruments had to perform in the void of space. If they had failed, the telecommunications systems would have been an extravagant waste. Mudgway explains how DSN personnel met their assigned tasks on schedule, within performance margin, and within budget. He establishes the context for the big dishes, details the backgrounds and skills of the JPL and contract engineers, and describes the process by which the antenna design and implementation were selected. This reviewer, experienced with similar antennas but of lesser size and shorter reach, found the description of the building of the 210-foot-diameter Goldstone Advanced Antenna a delight. The author and publisher of Big Dish have married a careful narrative of its construction with excellent photographs, clear diagrams, and understandable annotations.

The history of the NASA/JPL DSN is enlivened by Mudgway's personal reflections on human factors. Not everything went according to design. Uplink-Downlink described neither the capabilities of the men nor their methodologies for solving problems that required special ingenuity. But here Mudgway addresses cost-effective enhancements of the DSN to accommodate the continuing extension of NASA's reach into space. He explains the mechanical design upgrades beginning with the first 26-meter (78-foot-diameter) antenna at Pioneer Site, Goldstone, California, to the final 70-meter (210-foot-diameter) antennas placed around the globe, but describes the electronic and software innovations in less detail; one must go back to Uplink-Downlink for that story. In Big Dish, Mudgway addresses descriptive-resistant networking innovations, the engineering strategies for sending signals to even more distant space probes and receiving their even more faint signals. His story is about the building of the giant antennas and about their brilliant builders. The general reader, the specialist, and the historian are all well served.