This book summarizes achievements in space exploration up to its publication date of 1989. The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for space exploration, both human and robotic. At that time, Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray formed the Planetary Society to help back scientific exploration in the heavly cold-war driven space race. Bruce Murray wrote this summary of achievements. many of the space probes mentioned in this book were either designed by or proposed by the co-founder of the Society, Carl Sagan.

The end of that era, not mentioned in the book but occuring very close to publication date was thefirst and last photo of earth from deep space, outside the solar system. The photo was named "Pale Blue Dot". It was taken by one of Sagan's space probes after it left the solar system and required much lobbying by sagan himself to get NASA to turn the spacecraft around for tha last picture. That photo became famous and was later the title of one of Sagan's last books.

This book by Murray does a very good job documenting the details fo space discovery up until that moment.

I should mention that there has been a mini-second golden age, just for mars exploration this last decade.

Murray;s book is perfect for the chronology of that first golden age. ( )