This review includes some spoilers.
Review:
Melville, South Carolina has produced two astronauts: Walter Reddie, who flunked out of the Shuttle Program, never went to space, and is now a drunk; and Walter's second cousin once removed, Bobby Campbell, Jr., who is doomed to die alone on the International Space Station after ensuring the safe return of his six other crewmates. NASA doesn't have the funds to save him, and the only one making noises about doing anything is Richard Branson, but Walter knows it's just that, noises.
Walter has an idea. If NASA won't save Bobby Campbell, Jr., then he and Melville, South Carolina will. Initially, it seems like a bad joke. Walter's an aging drunk, and astrophysicists aren't exactly growing on trees in Melville. Gradually, however, a movement starts to build around Walter, something so big and powerful that the world can't help but wonder whether the self-proclaimed "Redneck NASA" will manage to save Bobby Campbell, Jr. after all.
In his introduction, Hendrix says he wrote this back in 2011, inspired by Occupy Wall Street. There was definitely a lot of idealism at play, as Walter and his "Redneck NASA" somehow managed to build something that worked, although Hendrix didn't completely leave the real world behind. The issue of funding was handwaved away by Kickstarters, the grounds of "Redneck NASA" were exactly as filthy and stinky as you'd expect, and legal issues and the feds did start to plague the project, although much more slowly than I'd have expected for something that eventually involved the purchase of half a million tons of high explosives. (Somehow "is a whiz at couponing" translated to "can figure out how to buy massive amounts of supplies and military-grade equipment.")
Day-to-day life wasn't focused on much, and most of "Redneck NASA" was composed of hordes of humanity rather than individuals with names, although a few people stuck out, like Tiara, Volor, Big Patty, and Memomma (whose Excel spreadsheet was mighty, although after a certain point she probably should have learned how to set up a database). Which is to say that, yes, people got hurt as one would expect, but it never stopped the horde or even made it pause for a second.
One of the reasons this project even managed to get off the ground was that, for a while at least (until it got too big), the person taking the biggest risks was going to be Walter, who didn't care whether he lived or died as long as he finally got to be the astronaut he'd trained to be. He'd be the one strapped to a rocket that might send him to Bobby or might just vaporize him. Eventually, though, this project ate up everything around it. Walter got eight horses killed with his alcoholism (not much detail, but it was still annoying the way he kept trying to blow it off as no big deal). And after the feds came, literal children and grannies were set up as human shields to protect the project and allow it to continue, on the theory that they wouldn't intentionally pepper spray children.
I still don't know what I think about the ending. I think it was supposed to be hopeful/rousing, and yes, everyone proved that they could do more and be more than the world expected of them, but these folks were kind of running out of stuff to rally behind. Wasn't Bobby supposed to run out of supplies in about 6 months anyway? And wouldn't the way things turned out make survival even less likely?
All in all, this was a bonkers read with amusing moments, but Andy Weir's The Martian had a combination of "idealism + space survival" that worked better for me overall than this.
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