Content area
Full Text
From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet: India's Space Journey. Edited by P. V. Manoranjan Rao, B. N. Suresh, and V. P. Balagangadharan. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in association with HarperCollins India, 2016. Pp. 736. $34.99. EPUB 2015 download available free through ISRO at http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25mars-orbiter-mission/fishing-hamlet-to-red-planet-download-e-book.
From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet: India's Space Journey is like so many other histories written by engineers and scientists, long on nuts and bolts and the march of progress but short on analysis and context. Edited by a senior Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) physicist, P. V. Manoranjan Rao, in association with two of his former colleagues in the organization, it seeks to explore the history of the ISRO. The editors assembled a team of colleagues to contribute sections to the book, and the authorship is without question a who's who of Indian space leaders, as well as some others who are international figures in the spaceflight community. Rao believes that the main feature of this "compendium," his descriptive term rather than "history," is that it traces the space journey of India through the "original voices" of spaceflight...