Peter Bond's Out of This World: an astronaut history
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- Peter Bond's "Out of This World: Life as an astronaut" — published by Reaktion (UK) and University of Chicago Press (US) — takes a thematic rather than chronological approach, opening with "Learning to Leave Earth" and tracing how the WWII-era V-2 rocket became the foundation for first-generation space launchers.
- The book shows space exploration has always been tied to major powers jockeying for influence, from the cold war US-Soviet moon race to NASA's contemporary Artemis effort to return humans to the lunar surface.
- Bond draws on astronauts' diaries and interviews, quoting Michael Collins' Apollo 11 mission log: "Not since Adam has man known such solitude as Mike Collins when he passes around the back of the Moon."
- The 1968 Apollo 7 crew fought mission control over wearing their helmets while suffering colds brought on board — one of several anecdotes illustrating that astronauts "get grumpy on the job just like everyone else."
- China's taikonauts receive repeated attention throughout the book, which frames their inclusion as pointing toward "a more international, though certainly no less politically fraught," future for human spaceflight.
- The book's closing chapter catalogues lives lost in space, from the Challenger disaster in 1986, which killed seven crew, to fatalities among early Russian cosmonauts — a solemn ending the reviewer credits with curbing "remaining human hubris."
- Bond preserves oddities like Igor Volk smuggling pickles onto the Soyuz T-12 mission in July 1984, billed as the first person to smuggle pickles into orbit.
Why it matters: The reviewer explicitly flags Bond's near-total omission of debates over colonising the Moon and Mars for private and national profit — a notable gap given that NASA's Artemis mission has been partially restructured even as the book went to print, leaving readers without the political-economy framework that now defines the next lunar push.
