Back to the Moon by Homer Hickam
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m not much of a fiction reader, and this book unfortunately reinforced my tastes rather than making me eager to read more fiction. I have to imagine that Mr. Hickam, as a former NASA engineer, had his tongue very firmly planted in his cheek as he wrote the book. It’s so full of incredulous events and technical impossibilities that if you were not aware of Mr. Hickam’s background, you’d think it was written by someone who knew nothing about how spacecraft actually work and just set out to pen a thriller set aboard the space shuttle.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was doing this entirely for fun. Think Roger Moore in “Moonraker” in terms of level of accuracy. I felt guilty reading it, but I also had a hard time putting it down because I couldn’t resist seeing what wildly improbable event was coming up next.
Hardest for me to read were the accounts of the space shuttle surviving ‘battle damage’ in space and collisions with other vehicles, even going into reentry with a Soyuz hanging off its tail. I have just written a book about the shuttle Columbia, which was destroyed thanks to the impact of a 1-pound block of foam. (Hickam’s book was written four years before the Columbia disaster.)
It would be fun to return to the Moon, but please–not like this.