Keith Cooper reviews It’s (Just) Rocket Science: Exploring Physics Through Spaceflight Missions by Trisha Muro

Science is often easier to learn and understand when its abstract ideas are presented through the lens of our everyday world. Indeed, a key challenge for science teachers is to make the subject as interesting as possible to students, usually by showing its applications to real-world problems. As a former college lecturer turned science journalist, Trisha Muro is very well suited to this task.

To introduce her new book It’s (Just) Rocket Science: Exploring Physics Through Spaceflight Missions, Muro recalls how, while teaching high-school physics, she had a student drop out of her course because they “thought it would be more like ‘story’ physics”. Muro wasn’t exactly sure what the student meant, but the phrase stuck with her over the years, eventually leading her to write this book. Within its pages, Muro presents quintessential physics concepts in the context of spaceflight. She touches upon everything from the Apollo space programme to the Mars rovers, to provide the narrative aspect that makes abstract science relatable.

I’d argue that rather than story, the examples she uses in the book are more like case studies, as there is not much of a continuing narrative. Indeed, I couldn’t help but wonder if by “story”, Muro’s student meant science-fiction physics rather than real-life examples, but that’s semantics. What Muro has written is a very effective guide to all manner of basic physics that draws upon all her experience as a physics teacher and all her skills as a science writer.

In It’s (Just) Rocket Science, each chapter features an interview with one or two scientists (refreshingly, mostly women) providing insights into how the missions that they work on employ physics. There are some clear and concise explanations and neat analogies throughout. Muro provides a treatise on general relativity by highlighting the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of gravitational lensing. She also includes a fascinating explanation of momentum via the physics of NASA’s DART mission, which impacted and deflected the little asteroid Dimorphos. Muro’s description of the electromagnetic spectrum is aided by discussions about interplanetary radio communications, the spectroscopic measurements of Venus that the forthcoming DAVINCI mission will make, and the X-ray vision of the Chandra Observatory.

The chapters I enjoyed best were in part two of the book where, as a self-confessed Space Cadet, Muro talks about how she attended a NASA Space Camp in the 1980s. (She is donating 100% of the proceeds from this book towards funding scholarships for children to attend the camp too.) In this section, Muro takes us through the science of rocket launches and landing on other worlds. She explains how the balance of forces as described by Newton’s laws of motion will enable NASA’s Dragonfly helicopter mission to fly on Saturn’s moon Titan. I especially liked the ice-skating analogy that Muro used to describe gravitational slingshots. Imagine two ice skaters, one being yourself and the other a champion speed skater, writes Muro. You get a head start, then the speed skater races up alongside you, takes your hand just for a moment and then lets you go, giving you an energy boost.

Muro gets through an impressive amount of science in a short space – the first 50 pages alone are full of heavy topics such as Kepler’s laws of orbital motion, planetary transits, exoplanet science, Lagrange points, gravitation, the three-body problem, general and special relativity, the concept of space–time, the speed of light, the Doppler effect, and even an equation or two. Phew! That’s a lot of science, and while at times it might feel dense to the uninitiated, at no point is it too confusing or impenetrable for the science or space enthusiast.

Muro’s willingness to include equations (there are even two interludes featuring derivations) reminds us of her teaching background. I found it refreshing to see maths presented front and centre when most popular-science books shy away from it, in an attempt not to lose readers. In this book, the maths isn’t complex and it is crucial in showing us why various physical laws work the way that they do.

One small issue for me was Muro’s decision to incorporate both imperial and metric units, which made for some confusing reading. In some instances, she mixes the systems in the same sentence – for example, giving a distance in kilometres followed by a weight in pounds, or a speed in miles per hour followed by energy in joules. Muro comments in the chapter about momentum and the DART mission that she has been using both systems to help readers become more comfortable with them. However, if the conversions between imperial and metric are not going to be given, then I’m not sure she really succeeds at making people more comfortable using metric.

If I were to nitpick further, I’d point out that when Muro strays from straight physics and engineering to astrophysics, some mistakes do crop up. These include stating that objects in the early universe are “red” because they have been cooling for billions of years. What is really happening is we are seeing them as they were long ago and their colour is the product of cosmological redshift, not temperature. Another is implying that gravitational waves are what cause the orbits of asteroids and comets to be perturbed. This ignores the fact that gravitational interaction from the planets, particularly Jupiter, is the dominant influence. However, these errors do not detract from the otherwise clear and correct explanations of the physics, which are easy to read and pitched perfectly for students below university level.

Overall, It’s (Just) Rocket Science is an excellent book that turns abstract physics into something more relevant. With the popularity of the recent Artemis II mission, the book’s focus on space missions will hopefully help it find an audience who will really take all that Muro has to teach on board.

• 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press £25.50 hb 384pp