Mastering rocket science

Now that we are stupidly rendering Earth almost entirely uninhabitable by many species including our own (through overcrowding, failing political systems, chemical pollution and climate disorder), a few humans of means are looking forward to migrating soon to other planets, even though, as yet, there are no good hotels and restaurants there. Scientists, stimulated by international rivalry and their own ambitions during the past century, have put together the machines and propellants for interplanetary travel. Here are two excellent, microscopically detailed books about the most important individuals and organisations that achieved personkind’s first progress into space.

In Escape from Earth, Fraser MacDonald, who teaches historical geography at Edinburgh University, has raised a crucially influential American pioneer rocketeer from obscurity to the recognition he deserves. Frank J. Malina, born in Brenham, Texas in 1912, of Czechoslovakian immigrant parents, developed a rocket that was propelled at five times the speed of sound up to 224 miles in altitude, on which even more powerful, longer-range rockets were founded.