Three new books ask what an astronaut is actually for now

Three books published this year, reviewed together by MIT Technology Review's Becky Ferreira, make roughly the same case from different angles: humans keep going to space for reasons that have little to do with the rational, mission-driven language space agencies typically use to justify it. The books are Deana L. Weibel's "The Ultraview Effect," Eiman Jahangir's "A Heart for Space," and Leroy Chiao and Victoria Bruce's "Dinner with an Astronaut," and together they land at a moment when who actually gets to fly, and why, is changing faster than the language used to describe it.

Weibel's central idea gives the review its title: the "ultraview effect," a cosmic-scale version of the well-documented "overview effect" astronauts report on seeing Earth from orbit, extended to the vastly larger, more disorienting scale of deep space. She frames spaceflight as something closer to modern pilgrimage than engineering achievement.

“We go into space because we want to explore. We want to see what it's like to walk on another world.”

— Deana L. Weibel, author, "The Ultraview Effect"

The books lean on a mix of historical and current examples to make that case. Apollo 8's Bill Anders captured "Earthrise," the photograph credited with popularizing the overview effect in the first place, decades before Artemis II astronauts pushed past Apollo 13's distance-from-Earth record by roughly 4,000 miles. William Shatner, describing his own brief 2021 trip to suborbital space, reportedly saw Earth as "a comforter of blue" set against the "black ugliness" of space itself — the kind of visceral, non-technical language the books argue matters as much as any mission objective. Eiman Jahangir's own path into the genre came through winning a raffle seat on Blue Origin's New Shepard-26 flight in August 2024, one of more than 80 civilian passengers the company has now flown to suborbital space, a number that would have been unthinkable for most of the astronaut program's history.

• Books reviewed: Weibel's "The Ultraview Effect" (UC Press), Jahangir's "A Heart for Space" (Forefront Books), Chiao and Bruce's "Dinner with an Astronaut" (Hanover Square Press), all 2026
• Artemis II beat Apollo 13's distance-from-Earth record by about 4,000 miles
• Blue Origin has flown more than 80 civilian passengers to suborbital space
• Apollo 8's "Earthrise" photo, taken by Bill Anders, is credited with popularizing the overview effect

Leroy Chiao's contribution leans less on cosmic philosophy and more on why the public still cares at all, arguing that the presence of an actual person, rather than a probe or a robot, is what keeps space exploration legible to people who will never go themselves.

“People identify when there's a human out there doing it.”

— Leroy Chiao, co-author, "Dinner with an Astronaut"

The review's own framing is less starry-eyed than any of the three books: it traces the astronaut's role from Cold War national prestige toward something closer to personal transformation and, increasingly, a product paid for by whoever can afford the seat. That shift toward commercially funded spaceflight, the kind of ambition companies like SpaceX have staked enormous valuations on, is exactly why the review closes on a note of caution rather than pure wonder: as the power to decide who gets the ultraview effect concentrates in a small number of billionaires and government space agencies, the books' shared argument that spaceflight belongs to some deeper human impulse sits uneasily next to the fact that fewer and fewer people actually get to test that theory firsthand.