Book Review: Robots in Space - The Secret Lives of Our Planetary Explorers by Dr Ezzy Pearson ★★★⯪☆

Mars is the only planet entirely populated by robots. This book is a catalogue of the history of robotic explorers. Nary a human-crewed mission is mentioned, except in passing. Instead, we get to look at the practicalities of landing a little robot a million miles away, the people that made it happen, and the politics which inevitably stymied things.

And there is a lot of politics.

One of the weakest areas is the political analysis behind the stories. For example, a Soviet Lunar rover is described as being "daubed with the sickle and hammer" - but there's no derogatory mention of the stars, stipes, and eagles on American craft. Similarly we hear about "the Soviet plans to invade Mars proceeded unabated" - there's no deriding description of the American plans to colonise various planets. The efforts of the European Space Agency described as "[m]ore than fifty industrial contractors from fifteen nations were involved in construction. Safe to say, it was a logistical nightmare." - while ignoring the various back-room deals that led to the American space programme being distributed around their country and their resultant logistical problems.

It isn't relentlessly pro-American (there's lots of descriptions of their failures) but it feels a bit one-sided.

There are some gorgeous photos spread throughout the book. Sadly, the ebook relegates most of them to the end rather than interspersing them with the text. At least one of the images is incorrect although, thankfully, the attribution hyperlinks to the correct photo on NASA's site.

I'm being a bit down on the book. It is a decent enough look at all the problems faced by space agencies as they tried to send machines into the void. For those of us in the computer industry, it is depressing to continually read about how we're often the weakest link:

On 2 September, a computer command was sent to Phobos 1 to turn on the gamma ray spectrometer. A single hyphen had been left out of the code, transforming it into an order for Phobos 1 to shut down. There was no way to turn it back on.

Yikes! The book is full of titbits like that - minor errors which led to major catastrophes.

It's a good starting point for anyone with an interest in space exploration and how technical and political challenges can be overcome.