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| View Larger Image | Columbia: Final Voyage
by Philip Chien
| | List Price: | $27.50 | | Price: | $22.00 | | You Save: | $5.50 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 572477 | | Studio: | Springer | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 454 | | Publication Date: | January 23, 2006 | | Publisher: | Springer |
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Product Description
In ‘Columbia: Final Voyage’ aerospace writer Philip Chien, who has over 20 years’ experience covering the US space program, provides a unique insight into the crew members who lost their lives in the Columbia disaster. Chien interviewed all seven crew members several times and got to know them as individuals. He reviews in detail their training, their scientific work and other activities during their successful 16-day flight, the background of the accident itself and a detailed first-hand account of what happened that fateful day in February 2003. The author provides a comprehensive and personal look at both the Columbia astronauts and the STS-107 mission, together with a behind-the-scenes account of other people involved in the mission and their personal reactions to the accident. Forward by Jonathan B. Clark, widower of Columbia astronaut Laurel Clark Introduction by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 8 reviews)
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Personal memoir masquerading as journalism 
In his book about the last flight of space shuttle Columbia, titled COLUMBIA: FINAL VOYAGE, Philip Chien compiles a book intended to be a tribute to the astronauts and the science of STS-107. If you're looking for a general human interest story and an exhaustive description of many of STS-107's 87 science payloads, this will be a bonanza for you. But if you're looking for a clinical, unbiased investigation about how and why the Columbia accident happened, unfortunately this isn't the right book for you.
One of the book's strong points is its biographies of the crew, which are all good. The astronauts come across as everyday people with excellent skills and extraordinary jobs. One eventually feels a kinship with each of the crewmembers, and they certainly don't come across as supermen and superwomen, as is typical of astronaut narratives.
The book's other strength is also, unfortunately, its centerpiece: the science payloads, which Chien describes in great detail. I say "unfortunately" because the focus on science pushes the accident into the background for much of the book. Chien takes great pains to emphasize the importance of the science results despite the accident and loss of life, so if it's a great tribute to the astronauts, as Chien wants us to believe, it's a very sad, hollow victory.
The major weakness of FINAL VOYAGE is that Chien, a freelance reporter with a self-described two decades of experience, breaks a cardinal rule of reporting by drifting between tenses, beginning in third person (he/she) and increasingly touching on first person (I/me). The book should be told by a journalist, not a memoirist. I wanted to read about the flight of STS-107, its crew, and the accident; I was not interested in Chien's efforts to fit himself into the story.
As the book progresses into the accident and its investigation, Chien's tone becomes shorter and increasingly testy. His descriptions about the causes of Columbia's accident become unnecessarily emphatic. He spends too much time debunking myths and trying to set things straight. His occasional use of hyperbolic phrases ("absolutely wrong," "incredibly good," "unbelievably positive," etc.) make him sound more like a crusader than a reporter.
One cannot vouch for whether or not Chien's sources are solid, because many of them are left uncredited. There are no sources compiled in an appendix, other than a bibliography of websites. There are no notes on interviews, and no documentation of published or broadcast accounts. I also noted two e-mails listed in an appendix that were both explicitly marked "not for release to media," but Chien fails to account for any permission he may have had to publish them.
Instead of using footnotes, Chien bombards us with frequent, annoying reminders within the text that a particular item is "available on this book's website." Apparently, Chien sees the book as an interactive document, and leaves the website to serve as a primary source for his documentation -- forgetting that websites are "perishable" artifacts. Good luck finding all the apparent sources, by the way -- I tried the website and found no such substance. And these are only a few examples of the book's sloppiness.
Unfortunately, this book feels too much like a personal statement, and it should not be mistaken for an objective work of history. Despite some strengths, its flaws are glaring, therefore I cannot rate this book very highly.
November 29, 2008 | |
Do not recommend this book 
I read "Comm Check" before I read Chien's book and thought "Comm Check" was great. Chien's book was supposed to have more personal anectdotes about the astronauts so I decided to check it out. I'm glad I didn't buy it. The stories about the astronauts, while heartwarming, were not worth the read. Chien's writing style is not as graceful as I would like (what's with all the exclamation points?). But the real kicker was his totally uncalled for comment about the Israeli government, wondering if they would have shown the same sympathy for a Palestinian astronaut as the Palestinians showed for Ilan Ramon (Arafat wrote a condolence letter to the white house). What the hell is that comment doing in the book? It made what was already a mediocre book go right down the toilet for me.
Save your money and your time; read "Comm Check" instead. It is a fascinating study of how the disaster unfolded and how NASA chose to ignore the foam/wing damage which ultimately lead to the shuttle breakdown on reentry.
April 28, 2008 | |
What Dwayne A. Day said...
What Dwayne A. Day said in his Amazon review of this book.
February 11, 2007 | |
Be wary
I worked on the Columbia accident investigation as an investigator and have read several of the accounts of the accident and the following investigation. William Langewiesche's article in the November 2003 Atlantic Monthly was very good. Cabbage and Harwood's book Comm Check is also a good account of this subject. I was wary that Philip Chien could add anything significant to this story simply because it has been well covered. Now I and others have a much greater reason to be wary: the author's actions in the spring and summer of 2006.
It was obvious that around the time of the release of this book Chien was posting pseudonymous reviews of it on the Internet singing its praises. These reviews usually bragged that Chien was one of only a handful of reporters who were actively covering the flight and also bragged that this book contained information that had not been previously published. Both of these claims were misleading and exaggerated. But the fact that an author was using aliases to praise his own work was underhanded. Now that Wired Magazine online has fired Chien for making up quotes and sources in space news stories that he was writing for them (you can easily Google that story, as well as links to some of his pseudonymous "reviews" of his own book), anybody who reads this book should be forewarned that the author has a track record of deception.
In fact, it might be worthwhile for somebody to go through this book with a fine toothcomb and check the sources and quotes. It would not surprise me if some of the same deceptive practices that got the author in trouble with Wired also occur in this book. Considering that there are better books and articles available--from reputable reporters--your best bet is to avoid this book.
August 31, 2006 | |
Thorough and informative, but too deferential to NASA 
Much has been written about the shuttle Columbia's fatal accident in February 2003. Newspapers were filled with articles from reporters who rarely before had covered space exploration; experienced space newsfolk followed the recovery effort and accident investigation like hawks for at least the next year. Few Americans are unaware of the event or the cause: external tank foam hitting a wing edge on launch, causing overheating and break-up on re-entry. The loss of another seven astronauts in this manner has been fodder for a blizzard of opinion pieces, both for and against further human space exploration.
But all of this post-event activity is a perhaps understandable reaction to the bleak truth: almost nobody cared about STS-107 beforehand. One of the few who did was veteran space reporter Philip Chien. Chien had the unique perspective of following the STS-107 crew from the beginning, of being on the spot working for CNN the morning of the expected return, and being the first reporter to realize something had gone terribly wrong. This impressive book gives Chien's detailed account of the mission: the astronauts and their families, the wide array of science experiments and the scientists and students involved in them, and the NASA mission support people of all stripes. Even more detail is available on a website (sts107.info) and companion CD-ROM.
The central question that the book treads cautiously around is whether the failure was avoidable or not. Chien asserts that nothing could have been done once the foam had hit the wing, and that was simply one of those random things that could have been expected to happen. One of every eleven shuttle flights had had a chunk of foam fall off the same place, and the others had just been lucky not to have been damaged by it. The fact that NASA hadn't responded to earlier foam loss with proper safety analysis and redesign, and the poor design in this regard from the start, were certainly valid criticisms from the accident report - but there had been 87 successful launches in between, and human beings do make mistakes.
Nevertheless, there are a large number of strands gathered here that suggest NASA considered STS-107 a really low-priority mission, and as an organization was not focusing its best efforts on it, just as the rest of the nation was mostly blissfully ignorant. The mission was delayed a total of 18 times, and followed the higher-numbered STS-113 and several other shuttle flights assigned to space station (ISS) construction and Hubble refurbishing. Columbia, being the first operational shuttle, was heavier than the others and not suited to deliveries to the ISS with its high orbital inclination, so in this mission it was relegated to the role of orbiting laboratory, carrying out science experiments that in many cases would prepare for further research on the ISS when it was ready.
The crew was quite inexperienced - among the seven astronauts, only three had flown before, and each of them only once. Rick Husband was the first shuttle commander since 1993 to be assigned to that position with only one prior flight; he did have a lot of ground experience. Kalpana Chawla (K.C.), on her previous mission, had been responsible for serious errors that caused a near-loss and zero science return for the shuttle-launched "Spartan" satellite. Mike Anderson, one of NASA's few African American astronauts, visited the ill-starred Mir station on his one previous shuttle flight.
Thanks to the delays some of the scheduled science experiments had to be replaced by others; one constant was an Israeli experiment (MEIDEX) to coordinate space and ground measurements of dust storms, scheduled to fly with Israeli fighter pilot Ilan Ramon. But the ideal time for that was summer, not the winter launch that finally occurred. Ramon himself, while clearly enthusiastic and having received the most training for this specific mission, had little of the background in science normal for a payload specialist.
The external tank was an older-model "light weight" tank, delivered to NASA in November 2000. The Columbia orbiter was the oldest of the shuttles; part of the schedule slip had involved additional repairs. It seems likely there was some institutional resentment within NASA about the STS-107 mission: both President Clinton, who offered a shuttle ride to Israel, and the US Congress, in specifically mandating a mission to explore the commercial potential of microgravity, had had their hand in forcing the mission on the agency.
Were any of these factors a cause of the accident? Other than the external tank's age, surely not directly. But they do suggest NASA as an organization was not devoting its best efforts to the mission, and lead one to wonder whether perhaps, despite the protestations to the contrary, something could actually have been done.
Chien makes a strong case that there was no option; the crew was even informed of the debate on the ground on the implications of the observed foam impact - and also of the conclusion that it would not cause trouble. Could a fully informed and more experienced crew, with a more alert NASA team on the ground, have noticed their predicament and found a way out?
Chien's book delves deeply into the human experience of the crew: their backgrounds, their experiences in space, and the family and friends they left behind. Chien quotes extensively from the astronauts themselves - appropriately for the most part, though his reverence for his fallen friends seems to have limited his ability to edit, and the quotes get repetitious. And do we really need to know what each day's wake-up music was?
The mission itself is described with one chapter per day, covering representative experiments for the day and the way the crew worked, interacted, resolved problems, and spent some of their free time. With a busy load of experiments requiring human tending and interaction needed with people on the ground, the crew split into two shifts to make maximum use of their time in space.
Some of the experiments described do seem rather mundane; many ended up producing little science since samples were destroyed in the accident, so it's hard to know what use they might have been. However, several of the successful experiments are particularly fascinating. While the MEIDEX experiment saw few dust storms, it did make the first detailed calibrated images of the atmospheric electrical phenomena known as "sprites" and "elves". The "SOFBALL" experiment created free-floating "flame balls", a simple stable flame structure that can only be observed in microgravity. Working with scientists on the ground the Columbia astronauts found ideal ingredients for making the things, and in one instance had formed as many as nine flame balls at once. Given their longevity, the team decided they had to name each individual ball. Unfortunately due to a drift in the experiment chamber they didn't quite succeed in the goal of keeping one alive for an entire 90-minute circuit of the Earth.
Chien's text is the most poignant describing his own experience of the accident and its follow-on. He had seen landings before, and knew what was supposed to happen. Before almost anyone else, when he heard that UHF communications was out as well as the overhead TDRS, he knew something really wrong had happened. He describes the accident from the perpsective of the public and the media, mission control, and the surprising number who were able to visually observe the reentry. He describes the recovery effort and the investigation; he was able to view the recovered pieces himself, and includes his own photos of damaged components. Chien also follows up on how the families are being taken care of, and a number of the many memorials that have followed.
Those curious about NASA and congressional responsibility will likely not be satisfied by this book; while he does point out problems, and flaws, Chien seems too close to the agency to have a sufficiently skeptical perspective. But this is a thorough, detailed, and worthy effort, and anybody interested in the people and the science of Columbia's last mission would learn a lot from it.
July 21, 2006 | |
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