Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 (review)

A complement to their In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2007), Francis French and Colin Burgess's Into That Silent Sea covers the Space Race from the initial human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in April 1961 to the first spacewalk by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in March 1965.

Into That Silent Sea joins an already vast literature on the Space Race. It is one of seven volumes in the University of Nebraska Press' Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight series, which, according to the series' Web site, is intended to be "a popular history of spaceflight . . . focusing on the lives of astronauts, cosmonauts, technicians, scientists, and their families." Into That Silent Sea must be interpreted in the context of this goal.

True to the series' description, Into That Silent Sea is told through the lives of significant individual actors. Although astronauts and cosmonauts are the most prominent characters, we also meet a fair number of others with minor but important roles in the American and Soviet space programs. For example, we hear the stories of Dee O'Hara, the astronauts' nurse, Jim Lewis, the helicopter pilot who tried and failed to recover the capsule used in America's second manned spaceflight, and several female cosmonauts who never made it into space.

Into That Silent Sea is not primarily a work of oral history. Although its bibliography lists approximately forty interviews and personal communications, the book is heavily dependent on previously published works, including other historical studies and period books and press coverage. A significant weakness of Into That Silent Sea is its citations—or rather, lack thereof. One can understand the authors' desire to avoid having footnotes or endnotes disrupt the flow of the narrative, but the absence of clear links between specific assertions in the main text and sources in the bibliography makes it difficult to further explore the fascinating anecdotes presented.

The book makes use of French and Burgess's interviews with seven people (six of them astronauts or cosmonauts), at least ten interviews from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) oral history project, and additional interviews by other researchers. Unfortunately, no information is provided about whether or how other scholars can access the non-NASA interviews.

One especially interesting part of the book is the exploration of women's participation (or lack thereof) in the American space program. NASA's decision to recruit military test pilots as its first astronauts led to an astronaut corps that was all male until the late 1970s. However, the NASA consultant who led medical testing of the early astronauts, a doctor named Randy Lovelace, also studied a group of female pilots to determine their medical suitability for spaceflight. Lovelace misled his research subjects, strongly suggesting that his testing could ultimately lead to space flights.

This story is not new and has been explored at book length before. But French and Burgess relate it in a new way by weaving together accounts of the careers of Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra and Lovelace test subject Wally Funk in a single chapter. The chapter follows both Wallys from childhood up to Into That Silent Sea's publication date, with much interesting material that is apparently from interviews (although unfortunately they do not identify exactly which interviews).

The question of whether NASA should seek female astronauts became controversial enough in the 1960s to result in years of bad blood between some of the women Lovelace tested and the early astronauts. Over the years, several of the women approached astronaut Wally Schirra and accused him (falsely, in his view) of having worked to exclude them from the astronaut corps. This angered Schirra:

I was quite annoyed that they felt that they were comparable to us. They weren't test pilots, very few had college education, and they were not engineers. They had no...