Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery From Space

by Roger D. Launius, Dennis R. Jenkins

Coming Home

Genres: Space, Technology, History, Nonfiction

325 pages, Hardcover

First published October 23, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Dr. Roger D. Launius earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (American frontier and military history).

Dr. Launius was a civilian historian with the United States Air Force, and became Chief Historian for the Military Airlift Command. Since October 1990 he is Chief Historian for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He is also Senior Curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

He is also involved in the study of nineteenth century history and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church).

Reviews

[Jonathan Jeckell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceeded my expectations. I learned a lot from this book. I knew NASA did a lot of work with space planes, like the X-15, lifting bodies, etc. but I learned that those were NASA's primary plan and capsules were only grudgingly used because of the urgency to get people up in space and the limitations of the rockets that were ready to go. Astronauts hated the capsules and the rescue at sea, mainly because they were drawn from the test pilot pool. The capsules inherited a lot of technology from making it possible for nuclear warheads launched on ballistic missiles to reenter safely. The Mercury capsules launched on Redstone rockets used a heat sink based heatshield and were the only ones to fly a true ballistic trajectory. The others used an ablative heat shield and used hypersonic lift to fly just a little bit. The Apollo program was well under way before Gemini and they tried again to insert a spaceplane for Apollo. NASA tried to add a para-glider or parawing to the Gemini capsule so it could sail down for a controlled landing--this was initiated by the guy and his wife who brought us the sport of hang gliding. NASA and especially the USAF were very interested in spaceplanes because they could bring substantial cross range maneuver that would allow them to land where they are needed and not where orbital mechanics dictate. So NASA and the USAF continued to pursue spaceplanes and that led to the Space Shuttle and the X-37B program. This book also covers the scramble to recover lost thermal protection system technology for various planetary landers, to include the Mars probes, and the Stardust and Genesis sample return missions. It's also interesting that propulsive landings weren't really considered here although the "belly flop" reentry that SpaceX's Starship will use was considered but extremely disliked by the USAF because it is essentially flying in a stall. Fascinating book

[Blake Armin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a space geek at all, read it. Incredibly fascinating account on the hardware side of one small part of space (and missile) operations.

[Andrew Breza · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed and highly technical history of how we've gotten spacecraft home since Mercury. Broadly, the American space program started with capsules that landed under parachutes before advancing to the space plane model before pulling a 180 and going back to capsules for the 21st century. The lessons of this book span history, science, and management.

If I were to nitpick, I'd highlight the lack of a detailed discussion of the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. In a book about reentry systems that extensively details the space shuttle program, the missing chapter on a space shuttle that was lost with all souls due to a failure of its reentry system is odd. Doubly so considering one of the authors worked on the Columbia investigation.

Despite that omission, I still recommend this book. Make no mistake, this is not a quick read. It took me a few years of off-and-on reading to finish Coming Home but ultimately the effort was worth it. If you're as big of a space geek as I am, you'll want to read it.

[Daniel Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting introduction to building spacecraft that can return to Earth's surface and the history of the engineering that makes it possible. It somewhat obliquely makes the case that the course of the US space program has been heavily influenced by the overwhelming appeal of a flyable spacecraft in the face of the extreme technical difficulty of actually building one. The main fault of this book is that it's almost exclusively concerned with Earth reentry from the perspective of the US space program. It only briefly mentions reentry for the exploration of Mars, Jupiter, and Titan and does not mention reentry demands for visiting Venus at all, which is consistent with the book's overall avoidance of mentioning the Soviet/Russian space program.