Out of This World
Peter Bond, (UK); University of Chicago Press (US)
Do Russian cosmonauts and US astronauts don their spacesuits differently? What was the first musical instrument played on the International Space Station (ISS)? And who was the first person to smuggle pickles into orbit?
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. Since then, humanity has explored space by simply going there, a feat replete with challenges, tragedies and oddities. In Out of This World: Life as an astronaut, writer Peter Bond chronicles many of these in great detail, offering a well-informed and unfussy view of space travel and life in space alike.
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His book is thematic rather than chronological, with the first chapter aptly titled “Learning to Leave Earth”. It’s an overview of early space flights and the development of the rockets and aircraft that made them possible, such as the second world war V-2 rocket – the foundation for the first generation of space launchers.
Space exploration, shows Bond, has always been linked to large nations jockeying for power. This section could have been enriched by more anecdotes and personal details from the pioneers. Instead, Out of This World moves quickly and covers a remarkable amount of ground. Bond’s next focus is the process by which different nations’ space agencies, such as NASA, select their astronauts, and how strenuously they must train.
Russian cosmonauts live and train in Star City, their own isolated townlet north-east of Moscow, and NASA’s recruits primarily undergo training in Houston, Texas. If someone has flown in space, you will probably find their name somewhere in Out of This World.
We also hear from the astronauts themselves as Bond quotes their diaries and interviews, providing his book with the necessary sparks of humanity. I was touched to read about the time astronaut Michael Collins spent in the Apollo 11 command module while the rest of the crew walked on the moon for the first time. “Not since Adam has man known such solitude as Mike Collins when he passes around the back of the Moon,” he wrote in the mission log.
The Apollo 7 crew got into a fight with mission control over wearing their helmets when they had colds
Astronauts also get grumpy on the job just like everyone else. For instance, Bond reveals that in 1968, the crew of Apollo 7 got into a fight with mission control over wearing their helmets while their noses were stuffy from a cold inadvertently brought on board.
While Bond primarily discusses US and Russian missions to space, China’s taikonauts often get the spotlight, too, perhaps pointing towards a more international, though certainly no less politically fraught, future. These tensions are prominent in Bond’s penultimate chapter, which looks at lunar missions. The cold war race to put a man on the moon is an example of the US outdoing the Soviet Union, but space exploration never became politically simple. US efforts to return people to the moon exemplify this.
At the time of writing, Bond acknowledges that there are many questions hanging over NASA’s Artemis mission, which is meant to accomplish the task. By the time I read Out of This World, part of the mission had been triumphantly completed, and part did, in fact, suffer restructuring. Notably, Bond has little to no discussion of debates surrounding ideas of colonising the moon and Mars for private and national profit.
The book ends with a solemn recounting of all the lives lost in space, from well-known incidents such as the Challenger disaster in 1986, which killed seven crew, to fatalities among early Russian cosmonauts. Bond’s writing is never lyrical, but a little more emotion creeps into this last chapter: he is writing to honour the lost lives, and explain how their superiors and support teams failed them. If 350 pages in which he patiently unpacks the many ways space exploration is remarkably challenging aren’t enough to curb remaining human hubris, a reminder of how fragile and perishable we are in the face of cosmic vastness might just work.
The next crewed flight to the ISS is planned for next month. I will be awed and anxious as I think about it – and the long history of space flight captured in Out of This World. Thanks to Bond, I’ll also remember delightful stories like that of Russian cosmonaut Igor Volk, who smuggled pickles onto the Soyuz T-12 mission in July 1984.
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