Customer Reviews

Spaceship Handbook

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I should state up front that I know the one of the authors. He's the president of my old model rocketry club. That said, I'll try to do a fair review.

To start: Add a star if you build model spaceships, static or flying!

The _Spaceship Handbook_ is a huge book. It's college-textbook sized, and densely packed with text and illustrations. The formatting and editing are spotty in parts, but the author includes a mail-in form where readers can list typos and errors. None of these problems detract at all from the usefulness and entertainment value of the book.

As the title suggests, this is a book about spaceships. Some are the pipedreams of early pioneers such as Hermann Oberth and Tsiolkovsy. Others are based on magazine articles, TV documentaries, and books of the "glory days" of the classic spaceship, the 1950s. A large and fascinating section explores the almost forgotten genre of 1950s television space operas, such as Captain Video and Rocky Jones. There are also ships from movies and comic strips, as well as "might have beens" (the Air Force MOL space station, the Dyna-Soar) that in some cases were months from being flown.

There are plenty of photographs, and lots of wonderfully rendered scale drawings. I found the authors' comments on how they overcame gaps and inconsistencies in the presentation of the ships interesting. (Hagerty used a micrometer to determine the width of the fins on Tin-Tin's moon rocket.)

The _Spaceship Handbook_ includes a fair amount of material about turning the spaceships described into flying models. It isn't intrusive, however, so SF fans and historians with no plans to build models won't feel cheated. Indeed, rocketeers looking for straightforward plans using standard parts won't find them here. However, the pictures of modeler's wonderful projects might inspire you to break out your drafting gear and wood lathe.

As a sort of bonus, The _Spaceship Handbook_ includes as an appendix a large essay by Jon Rogers on atomic-powered spaceships. It's actually a good general survey on interplanetary travel and rocket science. The pros and cons of various systems (ion drives, fission and fusion rockets, Orion drive) are descibed, although not in as much detail as I'd like. I think this appendix deserves to be fleshed out a bit and printed as its own book!

To sum up: There's plenty here for modellers, SF fans, space fans, and historians of the Space Age. Highly recommended.

This is a remarkable book! If you are looking for details on real and fictitious spacecraft, this is the source you need. It somehow rivals with Ron Millers "Dream Machines" although it does not cover that extensive time horizon and has a different scope. Model builders will find useful information and drawings (although sometimes not very detailed) of many spacecraft. The appendix covers a nice review on spacecraft propulsion with good explanations of basic concepts, like the rocket formula.
Something to criticize? Well: The subtitle should read "POPULAR Rocket and Spacecraft Designs of the 20th Century", because the authors have focused their effort only on collecting material from English language sources. Don't expect to find much information on sci-fi products from abroad, unless they made their way into US media. Nevertheless, this book is worth every single Dollar it costs.

It doesn't matter if you are a model-builder or not--I'm not--this book is indispensible for anyone even halfway interested in the spaceship as a cultural phenomenon--and I am. It covers the history of imaginative spacecraft from the early years of the 20th century up to the present, depicting spaceships from films, literature and even comic books. It is brilliantly and evocatively written, with hundreds of superbly reproduced illustrations--most of them in color. In fact, given the extraordinarily high quality of the book's production, I'm astonished it costs as little as it does--the publisher could easily have charge half again as much or more. A must-have for modelers, film fans, SF afficionadoes and aerospace buffs.

I admit I was suffering from sticker shock at the price on this book. Then I saw it in person at a show and had to have it. I put it on my wish list and my wife got it for me this Christmas. The heft and size alone is what first struck me. Then I opened it up. This book covers it all in depth. It looks and reads like a college text book. If it ever appeared in print or on film in the U.S., it's in there. Even obscure topics like the Silver Bird and the USAF MOL program are covered in full detail. The text is easy to follow and very in-depth. The diagrams are a scratch builder's dream come true. Even if you are not a modeler and just have a general interest in spacecraft (real or fictional), this is a valuable resource. I was struck by how each topic was covered in a very serious manner, even the fun topics like the Wallace and Grommit and even Josie and the Pussycats (yes that's in there as well) space ships! This is a wonderful book and I couldn't be more positive about it! A++++++ Mr Hagerty and Mr Rogers!

This book is chock-full of facts and pictures, and will be lots of fun for any SF or aerospace fan. It's also a great resource for rocket modellers, with dozens of dimensioned, color-keyed, multi-sheet spaceship drawings. However, it contains a number of simple writing errors that detract (and distract) from the reading experience.

I expect a hardback book to have been competently copyedited. This one wasn't. It's full of misspellings (like "self-distruct"), incorrect punctuation (including repeated occurrences of the possessive "its" with an apostrophe), and poor word choices.

Despite its flaws, though, it's still a great book. Buy it for the facts, the cool pictures, and the drawings, and just ignore the English errors.

I love the quote on the back of the book, "When the 20th Century dawned, the spaceship was a fantasy. By the time it closed, it was a commodity. See how one of humanity's oldest dreams became astounding reality." This pretty much sums up the book in a nutshell. Hagerty and Rogers provide designs for 75 spacecraft from fiction and fact. I haven't finished the book yet, but so far I also have enjoyed reading about the context for each design. This book keeps getting better the more I read. Highly recommended for modelers and space enthusiasts.

A great mix of material drawn from TV, books, magazines, and the real machines, both amateur/hobbyist, and profssional. This is a work of love and it shows. If you have dreamt of rockets, flown them in any scale, or just enjoyed them in books or pictures, you'll have a good time leafing through this respectful, detailed volume. It's only flaw is that it fails to mention some obvious choices. But, it covers a few that rarely get mentioned elsewhere, so the end result is stellar.

For someone that experieced and worked in Aerospace this handbook gives a very good account of the many space projects. Especially near and dear to me was the M.O.L.E. or the big pin wheel space station that was to be built by the Air Force. We were actually building hardware for it in the late 60s but it died because it was costing too much money and Viet Nam was costing too much. Johnson wanted his great society more than he wanted the M.O.L.E. This handbook also point the way to a forgone conclusion that we need to go to Nuclear propulsion and eventually to matter-antimatter power. I feel this is a very good and noble position in the face of the modern American aversion to anything labeled "nuclear". Overall this handbook gives us a good summary of many launch and missile systems, its' only omission possibly being the lack of some of the Military missiles, ie: Redstone, Trident, Minuteman, Atlas, etc.

Excellent source of detailed designs in all areas of modern rocketery; Fictional, Fantasy, and Factual. Recommended for anyone doing any Hobby or High Performance Rocket modeling and those that just want to know more about the history of rockets. GOOD BACKGROUND on all the areas of 20th Century rocket history and who did what... when. Great write-ups and details on many individual designs and the men and women that were involved. Example; For once the Russians were right.... one of theirs did it first, but... (well, you'll just have to read the first few sections to get the details)..... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Jack Hagerty and Jon C. Rogers have put together an excellent hardcover reference dealing with the realism of rocket science as applied to the famous spaceships of science-fiction films and novels. Here are detailed technical drawings of such vehicles as the "Luna" from "Destination: Moon", the "Galileo" from Robert Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo", the classic designs of Werner von Braun, the "Orbit Jet" from the "Rocky Jones Space Ranger" television series, as well as the ships seen in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (to name a few). The book discusses the practicality and background of each fanciful vehicle (as well as equally famous actual efforts such as the Dyna-Soar and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory) with not only an eye to the serious side of astronautics, but with a slight tongue-in-cheek approach in some instances. As an added feature: model rocket enthusiasts can also find tips on what might be required to construct actual flying models of the various designs. For the modeler, for the space enthusiast or for the SF-space travel film fan, this book represents an indispensable reference work.