Infinity Beckoned

Jay Gallentine is a historian and filmmaker who has spent more than ten years researching the history of unmanned spaceflight. He is the author of Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft (Nebraska, 2009), winner of the 2009 Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature. Bobak Ferdowsi is a systems engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

• List of IllustrationsForewordAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Beach Brainstorm2. What If…3. Dead at Birth4. Failure to Communicate5. Halt the Work, Destroy All Materials6. There and Back Again7. Sitting Cosmonauts8. Cauldron of Contradictions9. Buy-In10. "Prepared Area"11. Laying Eggs (Somehow)12. How Low Can You Go?13. Three Mistakes14. Devil from Redondo15. The Boy to Be Beaten16. How to Buy a Computer That Does Not Exist17. Downsurfing18. Gulliver's Travels19. Too Much Too Soon20. Scientific Charity21. Last Man Home22. Bonneville, Notch Rock, Double-Squirt, Sudden Death23. Post-Mortem24. Sons of a Bitch25. The Sum of All Nations26. Hang Time27. The Rules of Resigning28. Wonders Never CeaseSourcesIndex

"Based on numerous interviews, Gallentine delivers a rich variety of stories involving the men and women, American and Russian, responsible for such groundbreaking endeavors as the Mars Viking missions of the 1970s and the Soviet Venera flights to Venus in the 1980s. . . . Their legacy is our better understanding of our own planet and our place in the cosmos."-Lunar and Planetary Information Bulletin “In this lively and memorable journey, Jay Gallentine captures the amazing people behind history’s robotic explorers, who journeyed where no machines had gone before.”-Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon and A Passion for Mars “Jay Gallentine has written a truly engaging account of lunar and planetary exploration in the halcyon days of the 1970s and 1980s, when scientists and engineers were boldly pushing into the unknown. . . . [He brings] to life the struggles, triumphs, and disappointments of the first great era of deep space exploration. Highly recommended.”-Asif Siddiqi, author of The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957   “Infinity Beckoned is a stirring account of [the robotic race to the moon, Venus, and Mars] and its bobs and weaves over more than thirty years as both nations expanded knowledge of the solar system, expended resources for science, and competed for stature on the world stage.”-Roger Launius, associate director for collections and curatorial affairs at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution  “With Infinity Beckoned you’ll read a big piece of history you never even knew was there.”-Jeffrey Kluger, coauthor of Apollo 13