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Title: Infinity Beckoned

Subtitle: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969-1989

Author: Jay Gallentine

Narrator: Michael Burnette

Format: Unabridged

Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-07-17

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary:

Infinity Beckoned illuminates a critical period of space history when humans dared an expansive leap into the inner solar system. Jay Gallentine conveys the trials and triumphs of the people on the ground who conceived and engineered the missions that put robotic spacecraft on the heavenly bodies nearest our own. 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. From the dreamers responsible for the Venus landing who discovered that dropping down through heavy clouds of sulfuric acid and 900-degree heat was best accomplished by surfing to the five-man teams puppeteering the Soviet moon rovers from a top-secret, off-the-map town without a name, the people who come to life in this book persevered in often trying, thankless circumstances. Their legacy is our better understanding of our own planet and our place in the cosmos.

Critic Reviews:

"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)

"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." (Asif Siddiqi, author of The Red Rockets' Glare)

"Infinity Beckoned is a stirring account of the robotic race to the moon, Venus, and Mars..." (Roger Launius, Smithsonian Institution)

Members Reviews:

This is one of the best aspects of the book

First, let me heap much-deserved praise on Jay Gallentine. The research that has gone into this book is obviously extremely detailed, especially on the Soviet stories. Well done Jay; this book is a worthy follow-on to "Ambassadors from Earth". Thankfully, somebody has captured these stories while the main players are still alive.

A couple of tips: you need to concentrate and devote your full attention to the story lines when reading this book. Do not make the mistake I did of picking it up, reading a few pages and putting it down again. It becomes very hard to follow if you do that, not helped by the sometimes colloquial, conversation writing style. That writing style worked very well in "Ambassadors"; less so with "Infinity Beckoned" because of the added complexity of some of the subject matter. So you need to read this book in large slabs.

A major theme running through the book is the life science experiment program onboard Viking. This is obviously an extremely technical subject matter, and the results of the experiments were inconclusive and subject to interpretation by different program scientists who had experiments onboard. By including Viking in the book, Jay had no choice but to tackle the monumental task of simplifying this very complex subject. Although (by and large) this has been done well, I still found it hard to follow especially when split across a number of non-sequential chapters.