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Preface
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface When I (David) first became involved in the Outward Odyssey series, working on the Skylab volume, my coauthors and I were shown a list of proposed titles for the first eight books in the series. As authors working on our first book, coming up with a title seemed like one of the more exciting parts of the job. We were thus somewhat pleased to be disappointed with the working title the publisher had provided: “Exemplary Outpost.” It was an accurate title, but it lacked the poetry of the other titles on the list—titles like Into That Silent Sea and In the Shadow of the Moon. I’m not sure that we quite lived up to that standard with Homesteading Space, but we made our best effort. Even though it meant giving up the privilege of titling this volume, Heather and I were quite happy to go along with the name the publisher had suggested for this book: Bold They Rise. It was, quite literally, poetic, taken from the poem by series editor Colin Burgess that appears as the epigraph. When we first read the poem, very early on in the process of writing this volume, we pictured the title as being about the Space Shuttles themselves, reflecting the poem’s reference to “winged emissaries.” As the book took shape, however, we realized that was no longer true; the title had taken on a new meaning for us. Rather than being about the hardware, it was about the men and women who risked their lives to expand humankind’s frontiers. And in that vein, this book owes an incredible debt of gratitude to the nasa Johnson Space Center (jsc) Oral History Project, without which it quite literally would not exist. With Homesteading Space, it was relatively easy to create a book that filled a unique niche—with a few notable exceptions, such as a handful of official nasa publications and David Shayler’s Skylab, very little had been written about America’s first space station. Breaking new ground was not a particular challenge. xviii | preface With this book, the challenge was a little greater. There are more books about the Space Shuttle program, so it was somewhat harder to create something unique. Most of the previous works, however, fall into one of three categories—technical volumes, which span the entire program but include none of the human experience; astronaut memoirs, which relate the human experience, but only from one person’s perspective; or specific histories, which are more exhaustive but focus on only a limited slice of the program. Based on the overall goal of the Outward Odyssey series, a new niche we could address became clear—a book relating the human experience of the Space Shuttle program, not limited to one person’s story but including a variety of viewpoints and spanning the early years of the program. Originally the goal was to create a “Homesteading Space of the shuttle program,” but it quickly became apparent that was a misdirected goal. Homesteading had only three manned missions to cover, and thus we could delve much deeper and more broadly in covering them. To attempt to write about the subject of this book in that manner would be to do either the subject or the reader a grave disservice; we needed to narrow our approach to create something that was both relevant and readable. When we began reading from the jsc oral history interviews early in our research, the ideal approach for the book became apparent. Here was a wealth of first-person experience, describing in detail what it was like to be there—what it was like to involved in the design of a new spacecraft, what it was like to risk one’s life testing that vehicle, what it was like to do things that no one had done before in space, what it was like to float freely in the vacuum of space as a one-man satellite, what it was like to hold thousands of pounds of hardware in one’s hands, what it was like to watch friends die. This book almost exclusively offers the astronauts’ perspective on the early years of the Space Shuttle program, and, while research for the volume drew on several resources, the extensive quoted material draws heavily from the jsc Oral History Project. It’s the astronauts’ story, told in their own words, about their own experiences. Bold They Rise is not a technical volume. We would love for...