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Review of Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle

by Matthew H. Hersch The MIT Press, 2023 paperback, 328 pp., illus.

That history goes back 40 years before STS-1, when Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt proposed the Silbervogel, a suborbital rocketplane that would have allowed Nazi Germany to bomb the United States. It was never built (and had it been, Hersch notes, the vehicle would not have survived its first flight because erroneous calculations underestimated the heating it would experience) but it set in motion American post-war interest in rocket-powered aircraft that could reach space. Its development, though, was affected by competing demands and design compromises familiar to most readers that turned it, he writes, “from an optimistic effort to create a spacefaring civilization to an awkward, winged vehicle that satisfied no one.” Yet its vision of enabling low-cost routine access to space—“a comfortable spaceflight experience even for the lay public”—persisted even as the shuttle failed to deliver on it.

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