ROCKET SCIENCE

An introduction to our solar system and space travel.

Despite the title, only three of the 25 spreads explain how rockets work. The rest describe other propulsion methods (such as ion engines and solar sails) and various places of interest in space. What’s more, the description of rocket propulsion is unclear and misleading. A common simple explanation, not mentioned here, is that rockets push exhaust behind them to move forward, as jellyfish push water. Here, “a rocket burns mixtures of chemicals and pushes against the resulting exhaust to accelerate forward,” which makes it sound as though the exhaust doesn’t move—but the most important thing to understand is that it moves backward. Child readers are unlikely to pick that up from the integrated form of the rocket equation, appearing without explanation on the endpapers. Some content truly is beginner-friendly: “Getting to space is hard,” the text declares, adding, several pages later, “Getting to Mars is hard!” Other sentences ask much more from young readers: “Moons orbit planets, planets and asteroids orbit stars, and stars orbit the centers of galaxies, which often contain supermassive black holes, which have so much gravity that even light can’t escape!” Illustrations are straightforward and geometric, like a textbook’s, but with less detail. Vocabulary defined in a closing glossary is highlighted in the narrative, but some choices befuddle: Planet is defined, for instance, but suborbital path is not.

A surface-level hodgepodge.