Go for Launch! An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral.(Book review)

Go for Launch! An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral by Joel W. Powell with Art LeBrun. Apogee Books/ Collectors Guide Publishing (http://www.apogeebooks.com), 1440 Graham's Lane, Unit no. 2, Burlington, Ontario L7S IW3, Canada, 2006, 320 pages, $29.95 (softcover).

The history of space activities at Cape Canaveral, Florida, America's spaceport, is as interesting as it is varied. Go for Launch! seeks to tell this story--already available in both scholarly and popular as well as illustrated and textual forms--with an emphasis on illustrations. At a fundamental level, the "Cape," as it is universally known by those in the space community, may be as much a state of mind as it is a physical place. With high-technology enterprises resting side by side with a wetlands refuge, it is an eerie location--what Anne Morrow Lindbergh ironically referred to as the abode of both the "heron and the astronaut."

Go for Launch! attempts to capture the 50 year history of this place as the central space-launch site in the United States. There are three central components to the Cape's space-access efforts. The one best known is the Kennedy Space Center, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration installation that serves as the site for the preparation and launch of the nation's human-spaceflight effort. The Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle launches have all taken place there. The military also has a huge presence at the Cape, with Air Force and Navy facilities engaging in all manner of test and evaluation at the Eastern Test Range, extending into the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, recent years have seen a major effort to establish commercial space operations in the area, and a growing number of nongovernmental launches have flown from the Cape. The first rocket took off with the launch of Bumper 8 on 24 July 1950, establishing a precedent that has endured more than 50 years.

Divided into three major parts, Go for Launch! devotes the first part, nearly half of the book, to the period from 1950 through the Sputnik crisis of 1957. It relates in words and photographs the history of the military's effort to establish a launch capability at the Cape and to undertake research and development on a range of missiles and research rockets. These included ballistic ...