Brown’s The Mission chronicles years of near-byzantine maneuvers to accomplish a space mission—except that the Europa Clipper has yet to launch. Extensively researched with photographs and notes, the book is also creatively written with segments of near novel-like narration and dialogue.

Truax is all but forgotten to everyone but space historians, but he deserves to be remembered. Had he ever persuaded the navy or any major aerospace contractor to build his “big dumb booster” called Sea Dragon, we might have seen the sort of payloads and cost performance promised by Elon Musk’s Starship decades earlier.

Homer Hickam, author of Rocket Boys which became the movie October Sky, summed it up this way: “This is as important a book on space as has ever been written and it’s a riveting page-turner, too.” Required reading for understanding what is currently going on in space. The road to Mars begins here!