Now, using never-before-published quotes taken from his in-depth interviews with twenty-three of the twenty-four Apollo lunar astronauts, Chaikin and his collaborator, Victoria Kohl, have created an extraordinary account of the lunar missions. In Voices from the Moon the astronauts vividly recount their experiences in intimate detail; their distinct personalities and remarkably varied perspectives emerge from their candid and deeply personal reflections. Carefully assembled into a narrative that reflects the entire arc of the lunar journey, Voices from the Moon captures the magnificence of the Apollo program like no other book. Paired with their own words are 160 images taken from NASA's new high-resolution scans of the photos the astronauts took during the missions. Many of the photos, which are reproduced with stunning and unprecedented detail, have rarely-if ever-been seen by the general public. Voices from the Moon is an utterly unique chronicle of these defining moments in human history.

    Thompson tells the dramatic story of one of the most successful research aircraft ever flown. The first full-length account of the X-15 program, the book profiles the twelve test pilots (Neil Armstrong, Joe Engle, Scott Crossfield, and the author among them) chosen for the program. Thompson has translated a highly technical subject into readable accounts of each pilot's participation, including many heroic and humorous anecdotes and highlighting the pilots' careers after the program ended in 1968.

    But NASA's prehistory is a rarely told tale, one that is largely absent from the popular space-age literature but that gives the context behind the lunar program. America's space agency wasn't created in a vacuum; it drew together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer.From Wenher von Braun fleeing the ruins of Berlin to the Mercury program, tests of new technologies by pilots such as Neil Armstrong and, in the shadow of Sputnik, the final creation by Dwight D. Eisenhower of NASA, Breaking The Chains of Gravity tells the story of NASA's roots in an engaging and accessible way, against a backdrop of Nazism, communism, and imminent nuclear annihilation.

    The glory days of the Apollo space program. NASA send Commander Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America's fifth mission to the moon.Only fifty-five hours into the flight, disaster strikes. A mysterious explosion rocks the ship. Its oxygen and power begin draining away. Lovell and his crew watch as the cockpit grows darker, the air grows thinner, and the instruments wink out one by one.In this tale of astonishing courage, brilliant improvisation and thrilling adventure, the reader is transported right into the capsule during one of the worst disasters in the history of space exploration.

    Nearly four decades later, as the world's oldest astronaut, his courage reveted a nation. But these two historical events only bracketed a life that covers the sweep of an extraordinary century.John Glenn's autobiography spans the seminal events of the twentieth century. It is a story that begins with his childhood in Ohio where he learned the importance of family, community, and patriotism. He took these values with him as a marine fighter pilot during World War II and into the skies over Korea, for which he would be decorated. Always a gifted flier, it was during the war that he contemplated the unlimited possibilities of aviation and its frontiers.We see the early days of NASA, where he first served as a backup pilot for astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. In 1962 Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first manned orbital mission of the United States. Then came several years in international business, followed by a twenty-four year career as a U.S. Senator-and in 1998 a return to space for his remarkable Discover mission at the age of seventy-seven.

    The Apollo 11 mission that carried him and his two fellow astronauts on their epic journey marked the successful culmination of a quest that, ironically, had begun in Nazi Germany thirty years before. This is the story of the Apollo 11 mission and the 'space hardware' that made it all possible. Author Chris Riley looks at the evolution and design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Modules, and the Lunar Module. He also describes the space suits worn by the crew, with their special life support systems. Launch procedures are described, 'flying' the Saturn V, navigation, course correction 'burns', orbital rendezvous techniques, flying the LEM, moon landing, moon walk, take-off from the moon, and earth re-entry procedure. Includes performance data, fuels, biographies of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, Gene Kranz and Werner von Braun. Detailed appendices cover all of the Apollo missions, with full details of crews, spacecraft names and logos, mission priorities, moon landing sites, and the Lunar Rover.

    But in a time of austerity and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Coast and to the history of NASA, Leaving Orbit takes the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its earlier witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. Along the way, Dean meets NASA workers, astronauts, and space fans, gathering possible answers to the question: What does it mean that a spacefaring nation won't be going to space anymore?

    Whenever America wanted to peer inside the Soviet Union, it launched a U-2, which flew too high to be shot down. But Sergei Korolev, Russia's chief rocket designer, had a riposte: an artificial satellite that would orbit the earth and cross American skies at will. On October 4, 1957, the launch of Korolev's satellite, Sputnik, stunned the world.In Red Moon Rising, Matthew Brzezinski takes us inside the Kremlin, the White House, secret military facilities, and the halls of Congress to bring to life the Russians and Americans who feared and distrusted their compatriots as much as their superpower rivals. Drawing on original interviews and new documentary sources from both sides of the Cold War divide, he shows how Khrushchev and Dwight Eisenhower were buffeted by crises of their own creation, leaving the door open to ambitious politicians and scientists to squabble over the heavens and the earth. It is a story rich in the paranoia of the time, with combatants that included two future presidents, survivors of the gulag, corporate chieftains, rehabilitated Nazis, and a general who won the day by refusing to follow orders.Sputnik set in motion events that led not only to the moon landing but also to cell phones, federally guaranteed student loans, and the wireless Internet. Red Moon Rising recounts the true story of the birth of the space age in dramatic detail, bringing it to life as never before.

    The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated 37 miles above Texas, seven brave astronauts were killed and America's space program, always an eyeblink from disaster, suffered its second catastrophic in-flight failure. Unlike the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier, Columbia's destruction left the nation one failure away from the potential abandonment of human space exploration. Media coverage in the immediate aftermath focused on the possible cause of the disaster, and on the nation's grief. But the full human story, and the shocking details of NASA's crucial mistakes, have never been told -- until now.Based on dozens of exclusive interviews, never-before-published documents and recordings of key meetings obtained by the authors, "Comm Check" takes the reader inside the conference rooms and offices where NASA's best and brightest managed the nation's multi-billion-dollar shuttle program -- and where they failed to recognize the signs of an impending disaster. It is the story of a space program pushed to the brink of failure by relentless political pressure, shrinking budgets and flawed decision making. The independent investigation into the disaster uncovered why Columbia broke apart in the sky above Texas. "Comm Check" brings that story to life with the human drama behind the tragedy.Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, two of America's most respected space journalists, are veterans of all but a handful of NASA's 113 shuttle missions. Tapping a network of sources and bringing a combined three decades of experience to bear, the authors provide a rare glimpse into NASA's inner circles, chronicling the agency's most devastating failure andthe challenges that face NASA as it struggles to return America to space.

    For the first time NASA has allowed 900 of its 'master' negatives and transparencies to be taken offsite for electronic scanning so as to produce the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. From this selection of 'master' photographs Michael Light has distilled a single composite journey beginning with the launch, followed by a walk in space, and orbit of the Moon, a lunar landing and exploration and a return to Earth with an orbit and splash-down. Five enormous gatefold panoramas show the extraordinary lunar landscape.These photographs reveal not only the hardware of lunar exploration in exquisite details but also the profound aesthetics of space in what could be described as the ultimate landscape photography. The reader is encouraged to view these pictures as more than a spectacle. You start to experience them with a sense of the accompanying disorientation and excitement that the astronauts themselves would have felt. The Moon's surface and its extraordinary light are presented with awesome clarity.Full Moon was originally published in 1999 to mark the 30th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon. It was a milestone publication for the millennium, greeted with acclaim worldwide and published in eight countries. This new compact edition preserves all the superb quality of reproduction which was so evident in the original and makes this extraordinary work available to a still wider readership.

    They are found on the Moon, where fifty-six miles of car tracks lie nearly perfectly preserved, etched into the lunar landscape almost exactly as they were left nearly a half-century ago. The ends of these trails mark the farthest extremes to which mankind has ventured, the limits of a species that was born to wander.The tracks were left by crews of the last three manned missions to the Moon—Apollos 15, 16, and 17. Over the decades since, the achievements of these astronauts have dimmed in the shadow cast by the first Moon landing, Apollo 11. But as Earl Swift brilliantly uncovers, in so many ways the earlier missions were but a prelude for the final acts; for while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod a chunk of flat lunar plain smaller than a football field, the final three Apollos each commanded a mountainous area the size of Manhattan—traveling miles across the broken, desolate lunar surface, conducting experiments, and collecting more than a quarter-ton of prized geologic samples. Often treated as little more than historical footnotes, they were the true explorers of the Moon. And they succeeded for one very American reason: they drove.So-called “Moon cars” had been the stuff of science fiction since before the Wright brothers flew. But it was only after World War II that engineers and scientists took up the challenge of how to move astronauts and equipment across extraterrestrial landscapes. The result was the Lunar Roving Vehicle—a true engineering marvel that was developed piecemeal through the late 1950s and 1960s, deployed on the final three Apollo missions, and revolutionized the exploration of the moon.In this fast-moving exploration of the lunar rover and the scientific discoveries it enabled, Swift puts the reader alongside the men who dreamed of the rover, designed it, troubleshot its flaws, and drove it on the lunar surface. Finally shining a deserved spotlight on these overlooked yet crucial missions and the fascinating characters involved in them, Across the Airless Wilds is a celebration of human genius, perseverance, and daring.

    Unseen but listening intently was an audience of more than a billion people.It was Christmas Eve, 1968. And the astronauts of Apollo 8 -- Commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders -- were participants in a mission that took them farther (500,000 miles) and faster (24,000 miles an hour) than any human had ever traveled. Of the 27 previous manned launches, none had ever ventured higher than 850 miles in altitude. Apollo 8 was the first manned vehicle to leave the earth's orbit and the first craft to orbit the moon.Confined within a tiny 11 x 13-foot capsule -- the size of the interior of a 15-passenger van -- the astronauts were aided in their journey by a computer less powerful than one of today's least sophisticated handheld calculators. The mission was not only a triumph of engineering, but also an enduring moment in history. It was a triumph for America and its space agency, and assured the public's continued interest in exploring space.

    They passed the same battery of tests at the legendary Lovelace Foundation as did the Mercury 7 astronauts, but they were summarily dismissed by the boys’ club at NASA and on Capitol Hill. The USSR sent its first woman into space in 1963; the United States did not follow suit for another twenty years. For the first time, Martha Ackmann tells the story of the dramatic events surrounding these thirteen remarkable women, all crackerjack pilots and patriots who sometimes sacrificed jobs and marriages for a chance to participate in America’s space race against the Soviet Union. In addition to talking extensively to these women, Ackmann interviewed Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and others at NASA and in the White House with firsthand knowledge of the program, and includes here never-before-seen photographs of the Mercury 13 passing their Lovelace tests. Despite the crushing disappointment of watching their dreams being derailed, the Mercury 13 went on to extraordinary achievement in their lives: Jerrie Cobb, who began flying when she was so small she had to sit on pillows to see out of the cockpit, dedicated her life to flying solo missions to the Amazon rain forest; Wally Funk, who talked her way into the Lovelace trials, went on to become one of the first female FAA investigators; Janey Hart, mother of eight and, at age forty, the oldest astronaut candidate, had the political savvy to steer the women through congressional hearings and later helped found the National Organization for Women. A provocative tribute to these extraordinary women, The Mercury 13 is an unforgettable story of determination, resilience, and inextinguishable hope.From the Hardcover edition.

    Yuri Gagarin is one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, but the details of his life and the Russian space effort have been shrouded in secrecy: even the names of the engineers who worked with Gagarin were a mystery to the West for many years.Starman is the first book to tell the compelling story behind Gagarin's life and his audacious first flight into space aboard a converted nuclear weapon.He was once the most famous man in the world yet in his life, as in death, he was a man the world knew almost nothing about.

    But until now, we have known only half the story. With the end of the cold war, decades of secrets have been exposed, bringing with them a remarkable opportunity: the unmasking of the true heroes and villains behind one of the most exciting races in history.At the center of this exhilarating, fast-paced account are Wernher von Braun, the camera-friendly former Nazi scientist who led the American rocket design team, and Sergei Korolev, the chief Soviet designer and former political prisoner whose identity was a closely guarded state secret. These rivals were opposite in every way, save for one: each was obsessed by the idea of launching a man to the Moon. Korolev told his wife, "In every century men were looking into the sky and dreaming. And now I'm close to the greatest dream of mankind."In attempting to fulfill this dream, Korolev was initially hampered by a budget so small that his engineers were forced to repurpose cardboard boxes as drafting tables. Von Braun, meanwhile, was eventually granted almost limitless access to funds by an American government panicked at the thought that their cold war enemy might take the lead in the exploration of space. Korolev, whose family life was destroyed by his long sentence in the Gulag, was constantly aware that any false move would finish his career or even his life. His rival, on the other hand, enjoyed remarkable celebrity in America and was even the subject of a 1960 biopic.In this extraordinary book, Deborah Cadbury combines sheeradventure and nail-biting suspense with a moving portrayal of the space race's human dimension. Using source materials never before seen, she reveals that the essential story of the cold war is a mind-bending voyage beyond the bounds of the Earth, one marked by espionage, ambition, ingenuity, and passion.