From Jars to the Stars: How Ball came to build a comet-hunting machine
- 6 x 9 | 85 illustrations | end notes | index
- Cover and book design by David Barringer
From Jars to the Stars tells the remarkable story of Ball Aerospace – descended from the famed maker of Mason jars – and NASA’s Deep Impact comet mission, presenting an inside look into the backgrounds, characters and motivations of the men and women who create the spacecraft on which the American space program rides. It is a timeless story about science, engineering, politics and business strategy intertwining to bring success in the brutal business of space.
Ben Bova, author, editor, and President Emeritus of the National Space Society described From Jars to the Stars as “science journalism at its best: real, exciting and inspirational.” It is a lively account of one of mankind’s great modern achievements, From Jars to the Stars puts Deep Impact into the greater context of humanity’s continuing search for its origins via the senses of scientific spacecraft. It explores the improbable beginnings of Ball Aerospace and the evolution of the American space agency that paid for it, breaking new space-historical ground with the story of a group of University of Colorado students who built a “sun seeker” for the noses of sounding rockets studying the home star. The device set precedent for nearly all modern spacecraft.
The book also tells the story of how Ed Ball, scion of the Ball Brothers Company of Muncie, Indiana, ended up buying a space business in Boulder, Colorado through a combination of serendipity and strategic instinct. From Jars to the Stars explores both the personalities and the technologies behind Ball’s first spacecraft, the Orbiting Solar Observatory launched in 1962. The story of the space pioneers behind the first Ball orbiter sets the stage for Deep Impact, showing readers how much – and how little – changed across four decades of American space exploration.
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