Last night I had the strangest dream…
Somewhere before dawn this morning, I started a long, low-key dream in which I was composing a blog post about one of my favorite books: The CRC Handbook of Astronautics. The book was about the same size as the old classic CRC math tables handbooks (as opposed to one of the massive CRC chemistry & physics volumes), but contained a mixture of history, little-known facts, and mathematical details and calculations about the start of manned (and womanned) space flight.
In my dream, I was actually thumbing through the book itself, rediscovering historical items about the early space race between the US and the USSR (including the Russians sneaking onto a US aircraft carrier and recovering a long-stolen historical artifact). I remember hitting the 10-page discussion of calculus around page 162 — a digression to better explain orbital mechanics — and mentally composing a passage about how I almost wept the first time I saw that out of admiration for the authors’ and editors’ willingness to tackle the hard stuff required to understand astronautics rather than dumb the book down. As I went on through the book, I kept expecting it to end post-Apollo, pre-Shuttle, but found that the book kept going on. When it started discussing the US space program under Pres. Clinton, I became puzzled — surely the book was older than that. I checked the copyright date up at the front of the book and saw it was 2006. I thought, “That can’t be right; I’ve had this book for decades.”
At which point I woke up and thought, “Wait — I don’t own the CRC handbook of astronautics; in fact, I’m not ever sure such a book exists.”
As it turns out, it appears there was a CRC Handbook of Space Technology (1985), though I’m sure I never owned a copy. But the Astronautics volume I dreamed about had some great stories, and I wish I could remember them better. 🙂 ..bruce w..