Book Review: It's (Just) Rocket Science

book cover Review: It’s (Just) Rocket Science by Jeff Foust Monday, May 18, 2026 It’s (Just) Rocket Science: Exploring Physics Through Spaceflight Missions by Trisha Muro Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026 hardcover, 376 pp., illus. ISBN 978-1-4214-5426-9 US$32.95 In the preface of It’s (Just) Rocket Science, Trisha Muro recalls an incident when she was a teacher and a student asked to drop out of her high school physics class. Why did the student want to drop the class? “I was hoping it would be more like story physics,” she recalls the student saying. Story physics? Muro didn’t ask for an explanation then, but was—and still is—perplexed. Most readers of this publication are familiar with the physics concepts discussed in the book but might appreciate the vignettes about the missions discussed in it. Whatever “story physics” might be, it did plant the seed for what would become this book. Muro, who says she was inspired by spaceflight as a student to study math and physics in school, now uses spaceflight to teach basic physics, while providing insights—stories, if you will—into missions and programs. Each chapter of the book takes up a topic, ranging from angular momentum to the electromagnetic spectrum, coupled with missions and programs. A discussion of momentum and collisions is paired, logically, with NASA’s DART mission that collided with an asteroid’s small moon, altering its orbit. A chapter on how photons have momentum despite not having mass is discussed along with The Planetary Society’s Lightsail program that tested solar sails in orbit. Most readers of this publication are familiar with the physics concepts discussed in the book, including topics such as the rocket equation and the difference between orbital velocity and escape velocity, but might appreciate the vignettes about the missions discussed in it. Who will appreciate it, though, are those people who are interested in space but either don’t understand some of the basic physics or believed it was too difficult or too math-intensive to grasp. (There are equations and some algebra in the book, but Muro limits the most math-heavy discussions to some optional “interludes” between sections of the book.) It’s (Just) Rocket Science might not be the “story physics” that high school student of Muro’s was seeking, but it does tell a good story about physics and spaceflight that’s accessible to readers curious about those topics. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.