Recommended: Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery

Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery, by Stephne Pyne is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are the first man-made objects to escape the gravitational pull of the sun and begin to travel to the stars. In their journey they have done a “Grand Tour” of the outer planets and sent back enough new data on them to keep astronomers busy for a lifetime. Pyne tells the story of these remarkable spacecraft, from the early political and scientific battles to fund them through to their last planetary encounter, though they are still operating and sending data back and may continue to do so until about 2020. He sets their exploration of the solar system in the context of the two previous great ages of exploration, the First Age led by intrepid Portuguese explorers at the time of the Renaissance and the Second Age, in the 18^th century, that coincided with the Enlightenment. This is a wonderful book, part science and part history/philosophy, that shows the continuity of today’s explorations of space with previous periods of great explorations.