The best new books for space nerds

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

Books and spaceflight seem to be made for each other, and a good wodge of space books have been published this year, for those of us who will be on Earth for Christmas.

I have added Tim Peake’s memoir Limitless to my Christmas list, alongside the new English translation of Samantha Cristoforetti’s Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut.

Humans have been a continuous presence on the International Space Station for 20 years now. Or, to put it another way – it’s been 20 years since we were all on Earth at the same time. An engineering triumph and a truly unique orbiting laboratory, the space station has also been home to more than 240 astronauts, and they’ve all left their mark. This concept is explored in Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station. The book arose from a collaboration between Earth-bound photographer Roland Miller and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli. It looks like a remarkable book, and you can see some of the images on the New York Times website: Home Sweet Home in Orbit.

They say we’re in a second space race at the moment, but I’ll say one thing for the first