In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.
A similar sense of miscalculation hangs over Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts, a collection of five stories told from the perspective of a variety of objects that have, since the earliest days of the space race, been launched by humans towards the moon and beyond.
Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99 pb, 275 pp
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