Interplanetary Robots: True Stories of Space Exploration

The history of mankind’s efforts to explore the solar system is more than just a catalog of ambitious scientific endeavors and staggering accomplishments in science, mathematics, and engineering. It is far more audacious, fantastic, and insane than you could ever imagine.

You might crack open your copy of Interplanetary Robots and expect to find stories of technological advancement, budget overruns, governmental interference, great successes, and heartbreaking failures. But there’s far more waiting for you here, including espionage, luck, ingenuity, and multiple plans to NUKE THE MOON. (Plus some fascinating plans for the future, even if they don’t involve nuking the moon.)

The complexity, effort, and financial investment of each of these projects is mindbending, and you can tell Pyle could have easily written a volume twice the length in order to include everything worth mentioning. Enthusiasm drips from every sentence, and Pyle deftly manages to somehow balance hard science, historical accuracy, and crisp storytelling. Whether he’s broadly charting our ongoing efforts on Mars or giving individual missions a brief synopsis, every chapter is as informative as it is enthralling.

Interplanetary Robots is great fun, great adventure, and great reporting all at once.