Mike Gruntman, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California, has written what can only be characterized as an encyclopedic history of rocketry. It covers the period between rocketry's origins more than 1,000 years ago in Asia and the middle part of the twentieth century when the technology proliferated in the West for both peaceful and military purposes. As such, this work will probably become a favored textbook in courses relating to the evolution of the technology.
The book, in eighteen chronological chapters, takes the reader through a succession of ideas, experiments, and applications. Gruntman expends more than 100 pages before reaching the twentieth century, something unusual for most surveys with its emphasis on the earliest years of rocketry, and then proceeds to lay the groundwork for later developments by discussing "great pioneers" who paved way the toward spaceflight. These include the usual suspects--the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy, the German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard--but Gruntman also adds the Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, members of various rocket societies, and others to his list.
The "first modern rocket," in Gruntman's narrative, was the German V-2 built by Wernher von Braun's rocket team during World War II. It is at this point that events compound, advances in technology proliferate, and moral dilemmas arise. Simply put, many of those working in rocket programs wanted to develop the technology necessary to move beyond Earth, but their technology was used for destructive rather than peaceful purposes. As a classic example, Gruntman points out that Wernher von Braun served Hitler's Germany by developing the first ballistic missile, was a major in the SS, and used the horrific concentration camp labor system of [...] Germany to build V-2s. But he foresaw the potential of human spaceflight while working as little more than an arms merchant who developed brutal weapons of mass destruction. Von Braun never expressed any hesitancy about the morality of using scientific and technical knowledge to kill as many people and destroy as much as possible. In the 1960s, as the United States was involved in a race with the Soviet Union to see who could land a human on the Moon first, humorist Tom Lehrer wrote a song about von Braun's pragmatic approach to serving whoever would let him build rockets regardless of their purpose. "Don't say that he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical," Lehrer wrote. "`Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun." Lehrer's biting satire captured well the ambivalence of von Braun's attitude on moral questions associated with the use of rocket technology.
Indeed, it was because they could be used as weapons carriers that rocket development received the government largesse necessary to reach space in the 1950s. Spurnik, the first space satellite, was launched on a Soviet ballistic missile, as was the first American satellite, Explorer 1. Moreover, it was because of the cold war that such programs as Apollo, which landed Americans on the Moon in 1969, received any funding whatsoever.
At the conclusion of the volume Mike Gruntman takes us on a whirlwind tour of developments worldwide and closes with an assessment of the 1,000+ years of rocketry.
There is much to praise in this volume. It provides for the first time a modern, comprehensive overview of the subject. It also offers the best discussions available about some of the key breakthroughs in early twentieth century rocketry. There are also numerous sidebars explaining the technology and discussing the individuals who made it fly.
But for all of the book's positive attributes, it is very much a history written for engineers. This is especially true because of the author's concern with the linear process of rocket technology to the very great exclusion of any social or cultural factors that might have influenced the engineers.
As only one example, Gruntman expends virtually no effort asking the question--why rocketry for spaceflight?--when other possibilities existed. We know that Robert Goddard explored many possibilities for access to space--shooting a capsule from a large cannon, atomic power, high altitude balloons to the edge of space, etc.--before deciding that rockets were the only practical means. There have been others who question the method of rocketry for reaching space since then, and such concepts as the space elevator are modern reconceptualizations of the problem. Unfortunately, Gruntman expends little effort in exploring alternative possibilities and conveying the richness of the subject by emphasizing the relentless march of progress he views in rocket technology.
Even so, this is a massively impressive work that will be of real use to a large community of scholars. It will find use for years to come. I applaud Mike Gruntman for undertaking this effort and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for publishing it. "Blazing the Trail" offers an important consideration of the state of knowledge about this subject and will serve as a good starting point for further investigations.
