As a child, I was inspired by the feats of the first astronauts and cosmonauts, culminating with the Apollo expeditions to the Moon. As I grew up, I found that I was more of a historian than an engineer or a physicist. So, I began writing the stories of some of the people who were involved in the 1960s space race. I have since written about topics ranging from the strategic missiles that kicked off the space race to the Hubble Space Telescope, and today, I am the editor of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly.
Space travel began with the creation of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). While it is widely believed that America was caught napping when Soviet Russia launched the first satellites and the first humans into space, we now know that this belief isn’t entirely correct.
The Soviets’ inflexible decision-making caused their first ICBM to be an excellent space launch vehicle but a poor weapons delivery system. The first U.S. ICBMs gave America a lead in nuclear forces that lasted for decades but left America behind in the space race. To restore America’s technological prestige, President Kennedy set U.S. astronauts on the path to the Moon. To understand the story of the race to the Moon, we must understand the real story of ICBMs.
I have read many books about the Apollo astronauts and their journeys to the Moon, but this very readable book is the only one that took me along on the greatest human adventure in space.
Chaikin also left me knowing each one of these astronauts better than I did when I started.
This is the definitive account of the heroic Apollo programme.
When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their 'giant leap for mankind' across a ghostly lunar landscape, they were watched by some 600 million people on Earth 240,000 miles away.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the astronauts and mission personnel, this is the story of the twentieth century's greatest human achievement, minute-by-minute, through the eyes of those who were there.
From the tragedy of the fire in Apollo 1 during a simulated launch, Apollo 8's bold pioneering flight around the…
The Space Shuttle program opened up space travel to women and visible minorities, changing the whole meaning of who astronauts are.
This book tells the story of the first group of shuttle astronauts and their exploits in the Space Shuttle era in a form that I enjoyed, and that will appeal to readers who aren’t familiar with the history of the shuttle program.
The never-before-told story of NASA’s 1978 astronaut class, which included the first American women, the first African Americans, the first Asian American, and the first gay person to fly to space. With the exclusive participation of the astronauts who were there, this is the thrilling, behind-the-scenes saga of a new generation that transformed space exploration
The story of NASA’s Astronaut Class 8, or “The F*cking New Guys,” as their military predecessors nicknamed them, is an unprecedented look at these extraordinary explorers who broke barriers and blasted through glass ceilings. Egos clashed, ambitions flared, and romances bloomed as the New Guys…
While many people expect that the future of space exploration will look like Star Trek, the reality is that robots will be blazing the trail around the solar system and beyond for some time.
This is an important and well-argued book that explains the realities of distance and danger that dictate the use of robots rather than humans for space exploration. It also explores the reasons why human-led space exploration is so popular in spite of its great expense.
Given the near incomprehensible enormity of the universe, it appears almost inevitable that humankind will one day find a planet that appears to be much like the Earth. This discovery will no doubt reignite the lure of interplanetary travel. Will we be up to the task? And, given our limited resources, biological constraints, and the general hostility of space, what shape should we expect such expeditions to take? In Robots in Space, Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy tackle these seemingly fanciful questions with rigorous scholarship and disciplined imagination, jumping comfortably among the worlds of rocketry, engineering, public policy, and science…
Astronomers have explored space for centuries without leaving the ground. Some of the most important astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century were made by women who overcame discrimination and whose work is just now being recognized.
Sobel’s book not only tells the story of a group of women who revolutionized our view of the universe, but it also helps us understand how astronomers go about their work of discovery.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday
Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"A joy to read." -The Wall Street Journal
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or "human computers," to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the…
As someone who loves biographies, I can think of few better books than this thorough and readable biography of the colorful and controversial figure who was a leading figure in World War II, the Cold War, and the race to the Moon, Wernher von Braun.
His amazing life saw him working with the likes of Adolf Hitler, Walt Disney, and President John F. Kennedy and took him from the depths of the Nazi war machine to the heights of celebrity in America.
Curator and space historian at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum delivers a brilliantly nuanced biography of controversial space pioneer Wernher von Braun.
Chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and one of the fathers of the U.S. space program, Wernher von Braun is a source of consistent fascination. Glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, he was a man of profound moral complexities, whose intelligence and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition. Based on new sources, Neufeld's biography delivers a meticulously researched and authoritative portrait of the creator of…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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