- Performance: credited to Mike Massimino narrating his own memoir; the listing's three reviews are all for an unrelated cookbook, so no genuine listener feedback on the narration exists here.
- What it covers: overcoming repeated rejection, the Hubble telescope, teamwork under real physical risk
- Feel: personal and sensory, built around specific physical experience rather than mission-report distance
- Our call: a promising astronaut memoir on paper, but verify the actual audiobook reviews elsewhere, since this listing's are for a different book entirely.
Spaceman is a memoir audiobook built to put a listener inside the suit, in Mike Massimino's own words, with the zip and buoyancy of actual microgravity rather than a secondhand account of what it might have felt like from the ground.
Rejected by NASA Twice Before the Third Try
The synopsis traces a specific origin point: Massimino's dream of space began the day Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and the path from that childhood moment to an actual astronaut career was, by the book's own account, anything but a straight line. Growing up in a working-class Long Island family, he made it to Columbia and then MIT, only to flunk his qualifying exams and get rejected by NASA twice. He made it to the final round of astronaut selection a third time and was told his poor eyesight meant he would never make the cut, and even that did not stop him from eventually earning his wings and training in T-38 Air Force jets for the journey ahead.
The book's emotional core, according to the synopsis, runs through three specific moments: the surreal wonder of his first spacewalk, the tragedy of losing friends in the Columbia shuttle accident, and an enduring attachment to the Hubble telescope, the instrument he would eventually be tasked with saving during emergency repairs on his final mission. The synopsis frames the whole book as an ode to never giving up and to what teamwork can accomplish, pairing what it calls the nerdiest science with genuinely thrilling adventure.
The synopsis also opens with a specific physical sensation as its hook: what it would actually feel like to be strapped to a rocket accelerating from zero to 17,500 miles an hour, and later, what it looks like to see the sharp, precise line between day and night from orbit rather than from the ground. Those two images, the acceleration and the view, are positioned as the emotional entry points the rest of the book builds outward from, before circling back to the tension of the Hubble repair itself.
Massimino Narrates the Zip and Buoyancy Himself
Massimino narrates his own book, and for a memoir this specifically built around physical sensation, the zip and buoyancy the synopsis promises, hearing it from the person who actually felt it carries real weight. A story about strapping into a rocket bound for 17,500 miles an hour, or about staring down the precise line between day and night from orbit, depends on a narrator who can sell the specificity of that experience, and an author-narrator has a natural advantage there that a third-party reader would have to work to match.
The book also sits at the crossing point of two genres, memoir and adventure, tagged here under both biographies and memoirs and sports and outdoors, specifically under an adventurers, explorers, and survival label. That dual identity fits a story that moves from a qualifying-exam failure to a Hubble repair spacewalk, treating the astronaut selection process itself as much of a survival story as anything that happened once Massimino actually reached orbit. Crown Archetype published the book, and at 10 hours and 54 minutes, the runtime leaves room for both threads, the years of setbacks on the ground and the handful of missions in orbit, to get real space rather than compressing the journey into a highlight reel of launch day and splashdown.
Three Reviews for a Stanley Tucci Cookbook
Here is the most important thing to know before trusting anything else on this particular listing: the three written reviews attached to it are not about this book. All three describe a cookbook, one specifically naming Stanley Tucci and a title along the lines of The Tucci Table, filled with recipes and photographs, another mentioning being gifted Stanley Tucci cookware alongside it. Not one of the three mentions Massimino, NASA, astronauts, the Hubble telescope, or spaceflight in any form. One reviewer, kathy l neal, calls it an awesome find for a Christmas gift and mentions the item arriving quickly in mint condition for a used purchase. Grace Wright's review, titled The Tucci Table, praises the recipes and photographs and notes that each recipe gets introduced before the instructions begin. Kim's review describes the book arriving packaged beautifully and mentions gifting a copy alongside actual Stanley Tucci cookware to a bride-to-be. Whatever rating and review count sit on this listing were generated by people responding to a completely different product.
Formatting Artifacts Typical of a Print Listing
That means everything said above about the book's content comes from the synopsis alone, since no reliable listener reaction exists here to draw on for how the memoir actually reads or how Massimino's narration lands in practice. It is worth being upfront about that rather than dressing up synopsis paraphrase as reviewer consensus.
The rest of the listing's metadata backs up the sense that something is mismatched. The ISBN and publisher fields both carry small formatting artifacts typical of a print listing rather than a clean audio one, the price attached is a specific paid figure rather than the free placeholder seen on most other titles reviewed here, and the synopsis opens by noting the book is signed by the author, a detail that describes a physical copy rather than anything relevant to an audio download. None of this proves the audiobook itself is unavailable or flawed, but it strongly suggests this particular listing has been assembled from more than one product, and a careful listener should look up Spaceman's audio edition independently before trusting the star rating shown here.
A Rating That Skips the Rejection and the Shuttle
Based on the synopsis alone, this suits readers of astronaut memoirs who want a personal, sensory account of spaceflight rather than a mission-by-mission technical history, especially anyone drawn to the Hubble repair missions or to stories about failing a qualifying exam and getting rejected twice before finally succeeding.
Skip relying on this listing's rating or reviews to make that decision, since none of the three visible here actually describe the book. Track down verified feedback on the audiobook specifically, ideally reviews that mention Massimino, NASA, or the Hubble telescope by name, before deciding whether this is the astronaut memoir for you.
The displayed rating of 4.5 across 9 votes also cannot be treated as meaningful here for the same reason: it rests on whatever combination of ratings generated the count, not necessarily on anyone who actually listened to a story about a working-class kid from Long Island talking his way past rejection, bad eyesight, and a shuttle disaster to eventually save the Hubble telescope by hand.
