To Reach the High Frontier: A History of U.S. Launch Vehicles (review)

Until now, no single book has addressed the parallel and intersecting histories of American launch vehicles. To Reach the High Frontier includes a chapter on every American launch vehicle used to access space since 1957: Atlas, Delta, Titan, Minuteman, Saturn V, Centaur, and the shuttle. There is a chapter on the smaller launch vehicles—notably the Thor, Scout, and Pegasus configurations—some of which also served as second stages atop their larger cousins. And there is much discussion of rockets that never made it off the drawing board, especially in the chapter by Andrew Butrica about reusable launch vehicles.

An introductory chapter outlines the history of chemical rocketry from Goddard through Vanguard, focusing on the development of ballistic missiles during the 1950s. Indeed, the launch vehicles upon which the United States relies for moving into the twenty-first century—Titan, Atlas, Delta—all trace their origins back to ballistic missiles. The Saturn was the first launch vehicle designed solely to access space, rather than to access airspace a continent away. Still, as Ray Williamson notes, to serve the needs of Apollo the Saturn V used off-the-shelf technology that was frozen in that ballistic-missile era. Indeed, a key theme in the book, and especially of the last chapter by David Spires and Rick Sturdevant, is the forty-year ride-hitching relationship between the defense services and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The defense services provided much of the funding as well as engineering and managerial know-how to develop rockets. NASA generated much of the basic research and provided political cover to push the state of the art on American voyages into space.

Historians of technology may notice, as they read through the book, that a genealogy of sorts emerges. Indeed, most chapters start in the 1950s, when choices were made that set technological trajectories. What type of fuel? How to oxidize? What metal to contain the flame? Guidance? The universe of engineering choices did not expand greatly after the 1950s, and improvement mostly came in small and incremental steps. J. D. Hunley's exploration of solid-rocket technology, culminating in the shuttle's solid-rocket boosters, does the most thorough job of tracing the complex genealogy of a rocket technology.

Various chapters differ greatly in style and depth of documentation, but most are detailed and encyclopedic. Fortunately, much good configuration data is compressed into tables, and the endnotes are comprehensive and reliable. There is nothing here that makes for especially brisk reading, nor is there anything that breaks new historical ground. While there is rich and important detail on contracting practices and interagency rivalries that shaped the specific choices made for each rocket, the book provides little illumination of the larger social and political forces that drove the desire for access to space. Two chapters on the Centaur, by Virginia Dawson and Mark Bowles, both do a wonderful job, however, on the micro- and macropolitics supporting the development of liquid-hydrogen technology.

In his introduction, Roger Launius laments that access to space remains technologically limited. Despite seemingly unlimited spending to develop launch vehicles during the 1960s—building launch capability ahead of demand, some economists speculated—access to space remains costly, suffers from poor reliability, and requires long lead times. Dollars per pound launched is, therefore, one useful metric found in each story. The histories here remain keenly relevant to space policymakers concerned with returning the shuttle to flight, encouraging commercial efforts to access space, and planning the new vehicle with which NASA will return to the moon and beyond.