Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring through the Inner Solar System, 1969-1989 by Jay Gallentine (review)

This is the second book on solar system planetary probes that Jay Gallentine has written. His earlier effort, Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), received the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society. The emphasis in Infinity Beckoned, with its poetic but largely inaccurate main title, is focused on the interplay between the Americans and the Soviets in their efforts to undertake space science missions during the latter Cold War era. For the Russian side, the author concentrates on the story of Lunokhod 1 and 2, rovers sent to the Moon in 1970 and 1973 respectively. For the American side he emphasizes the landers of Viking 1 and 2 in 1976. There is much about both of these stories that is well known, of course, but Gallentine has made a contribution with his efforts to interview veterans of these programs in both nations.

For the Soviet efforts, Gallentine relies on the recollections and the documentary materials that various veterans squirreled away to tell the story of Lunokhod 1 and 2 more thoroughly than ever before attempted in English. Gallentine gained considerable insights from interviews with and documentation provided by Mikolay Babakin, Vyacheslav Dovgan, Ruslan Kuzmin, Mikhail Malenkov, and Izrail Rozentsveyg about work of the Soviet Union's Lavochkin Design Bureau on these rovers. He is to be commended for piecing this story together, especially in his telling of the tough job of building the first robotic rover ever to touch down on another body in the solar system.

Lunokhod 1 soft-landed on the Moon on November 17, 1970, and was intended to operate for ninety days while guided from mission control outside Moscow. The eight-wheeled rover far exceeded its design life and traveled around the lunar Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) for ten months while transmitting some twenty thousand TV pictures and over two hundred TV panoramas. It also conducted more than five hundred lunar soil tests. Its design represented a classic Soviet approach to engineering: tough and simple, sturdy and heavy. It looked like a bathtub on wheels; a large convex lid served as the solar array with a tub underneath that housed scientific instruments. Using imagery from a large panorama camera, a five-person team of controllers on Earth sent commands to the rover in real time to control its movement. Until 2010 Lunokhod 1's exact location on the lunar surface was uncertain, but excitement ensued, at least among the space community, when the orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted it on the Moon at 38.29° N, 35.19° W.

Lunokhod 2 was a virtual twin of its predecessor, landing on the Moon on January 12, 1973. It operated for four months, covered twenty-three miles of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back eighty-six panoramic images and over eighty thousand TV pictures. Its final location, unlike that of its predecessor, was never in doubt, and it has been a routine target for laser ranging experiments to the present. Gallentine highlights the excitement of these lunar science efforts, especially the unique feature of roving on the Moon. His account represents a good use of both traditional sources—in this case, for many years unavailable in the West—and interviews with several veterans of the program.

Gallentine does jump back and forth in his narrative between Russian and American efforts. Structuring his American narrative around the Viking 1 and 2 landings of 1976, he uses an approach very similar to how he handled the Russian stories: he interviewed key participants and mined documentary materials. Since NASA is front and center in this story, and since the space agency has always been enthusiastic about recording its history, there was a wealth of records on which to base his account. Viking has been the subject of several earlier books; the gold standard is On Mars: Exploration of...