A Ball, A Dog, and A Monkey

A Ball, A Dog, and A MonkeyA Ball, a Dog, and a Monkey tells the remarkable story of America's first efforts to succeed in space, a time of exploding rockets, national space mania, Florida boomtowns, and interservice rivalries so fierce that President Dwight Eisenhower had to referee them.A Ball, A Dog, and A Monkey covers roughly the first year of the Space Age, from the launch of Sputnik in October 1957 through Project SCORE, which placed an entire Atlas booster in orbit with a small communications payload, including a tape-recorded message from President Eisenhower, just before Christmas 1958. The book examines both the Soviet and American programs, but places far more emphasis on the latter, from the political machinations in Washington to the technical difficulties of launching satellites to the effects the massive influx of space and missile workers had on the once-sleepy communities around Cape Canaveral. (The title itself refers to Sputnik, Laika, and a squirrel monkey named Gordo that the US launched on a suborbital spaceflight in late 1958.)The book does serve as a reminder that the history of that era is about not just about satellites and rockets, but also the people who created them or were touched by them in some way. With a story as well known as the opening of the Space Race, and one with few new revelations and insights, A Ball, A Dog, and A Monkey focuses primarily on stories from some of the people (primarily American) involved in that first year of the Space Age. Some of them are famous: Eisenhower, Wernher von Braun, and James Van Allen, the Iowa physicist whose experiments were flown on Explorer 1. Others are more obscure, yet still interesting."A SCIENCE BOOK OF 2007" - NPR'S SCIENCE FRIDAY "A FUN, FAST READ...AMAZING WE HAD TO WAIT 'TIL THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF THAT YEAR'S TUMULTUOUS EVENTS TO GET THE POPULAR HISTORY THEY DESERVED" - Angela Gunn USATODAY.COMPaperback 320 Pages Simon & Schuster, September 2008