Excellent book about the unsung heroes of the JPL.

If astronauts and spaceships fuel the imaginations of little boys, Journey Past Selene more than ignites the scientific minds of grown men. Kluger takes us back to the early 1960s - just before man walked on the moon. Back to the beginnings of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its spaceships. These unmanned rockets were going on extraordinary expeditions, traveling to the unthinkable ends of the solar system. Journey Beyond Selene takes us to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune and beyond. We get a first class trip to fantastical moons with names like Despina, Titania and my favorite, Ophelia. We get to meet the ambitious scientists and engineers and hopefuls behind the project. We get ensnared in the red tape of government funding. As readers, thanks to Kluger's straight-forward, no-nonsense approach, we have the luxury of keeping our feet firmly planted on terra firma while our imaginations soar beyond Selene. ( )

You would be forgiven for thinking that the book is a history of Jet Propulsion Laboratories. For much of the early parts of the book it reads like one. But the author does stick to his subject matter (i.e. exploration of our moons) and stray away from JPL for a while before coming back at the end of the book.

If you are at all interested in the unmanned probes we've sent out over the last few decades to investigate our neighbors in the solar system, this is a very good book and I don't believe that it ever gets technical enough that it would put off anyone who wanted to pick it up. ( )