This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age

"Space! Rockets! When it came out I was about to go on holiday and wanted a thick book to read. Burrows is a science journalist: not a historian or a scientist. I find it incredibly readable, very exciting. Although it was written by an American, it didn’t cover up the fact that Wernher von Braun, the brains behind the Apollo programme, was a Nazi Party member who was absolved for his involvement with the Hitler regime because he could build ICBMs. The book contains a good account—as good as there could be at the time, given the archives in the USSR hadn’t fully opened—of the huge advances the Russians made, which became obvious as they first flew up the Sputnik and then put the first man in space. I find it an extremely readable account of a time I grew up in—almost like a novel. I wasn’t reading it with a professional eye because I don’t know much about space history. I remember it! I was 11 years old at the time. I was watching it with my uncle Brian in the middle of the night. Although I remember the excitement of seeing Neil Armstrong’s feet stepping down on to the ground, I was equally amazed by the fact that Brian was eating four Weetabix at three o’clock in the morning. We have lost a lot of the excitement about space flight. A year ago NASA trialled the Orion space capsule, which they may use to fly to Mars. The launch was in the middle of one of my lectures, so I decided to take a brief break and show the students the NASA live stream. You don’t see rocket launches on live TV anymore. The space shuttle has been scrapped and although there are rockets going to the Space Station, and private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin developing reusable rockets, they doesn’t enjoy the same media attention as in the 60s and 70s. So we all sat and watched it—the students were very excited. I hope so. As you may know, I’ve also written a couple of books about the history of the Second World War. One of the leading historians of the period wrote a very nice review of my second book, about the liberation of Paris, in which he addressed this exact question. He argued that because non-professional historians are writing for a popular audience we can bring things to life in a way that academic historians tend not to do. We focus on individuals, we use quotations and maybe even occasionally slightly creative writing about smells or sounds or other things that you can infer from historical sources. For example, in all my books I see if I can find out what the weather was like on a particular day, to see whether that can add to my description, for example when a particular meeting at the Royal Society took place in the 17th century. That helped to set the scene before I went on to what was actually discussed. I think professionally trained historians—who amaze me by their ability to integrate very complex issues—may miss out on that simpler detail which the ordinary reader enjoys. The main thing in writing history is that it’s a narrative. You know where the beginning is, you know where the ending is. I’ve sometimes thought about being tricksy and trying to tell a story backwards or to group chapters by theme, but each time I’ve decided it’s better for the reader to know where the story starts and where it ends."