Military Space History

Read the first English translation of the first-hand account of Zeppelin operations during World War One, written by Zeppelin commander Over-Lieutenant at Sea Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels, originally written and published in 1917. Procedes fund the building of airships.

It’s the 1980’s, the Cavill Family and their multi-national megacorporation have established human settlements on both the Moon and Mars. Their work in space has now significantly overshadowed their still substantial mining, energy, communications, defense and manufacturing operations still on Earth. The Cavills are also the leaders in the development of affordable clean energy on Earth and in space. But while the Cavills have continued to oppose the development of nuclear weapons because they had been the cause of humanity’s demise in Harold Cavill’s original timeline, multiple ...

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

Americans are fascinated by the undeniable mystique of the elite world of Navy fighter pilots. In Bogeys and Bandits, Robert Gandt takes listeners on a thrilling ride in the FA-18 Hornet, one of the fastest, sleekest, and deadliest aircraft in the world. Gandt lived and worked with several pilots learning to fly the Hornet: the identical twins from Middle America; the computer nerd with a penchant for speed; the grandson of a Tuskegee Airman, trying to live up to a proud legacy; and two women dealing with the post-Tailhook world of the Navy.

Their wings were weak, their talons broken…yet they flew the Soviets into winning the war against the Nazis. They were ignored, laughed at, and forced to do chores beneath their ranks. Why? They were the "weaker" gender. Despite being capable, they were initially denied entry into combat. And when they did enlist, their treatment only worsened: They were assigned worn-out uniforms and left to the mercy of rusted equipment on the battlefield. These adversities didn’t stop the Soviet female fighters from going ahead and showing unprecedented excellence in warfare.

July 1967: At the Moscow Air Show, the Soviets unveiled six new state-of-the-art aircraft. From among this lineup of new fighters and interceptors stood the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 - purportedly capable of outrunning and outmaneuvering any aircraft in NATO’s inventory. Yet even before its public appearance in Moscow, the MiG-25 had been a grave concern for Western analysts.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union - a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today. The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the 20th century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas.

The Cavill Family is continuing their late time-traveling father’s mission to save humanity from a nuclear holocaust. In the course of doing this, they have made enemies. One of these enemies kidnapped Beatrice Cavill and brutally interrogated her. She was rescued but the aftermath of her ordeal has changed the course of her life. But the changing world continues to lurch towards violent conflict despite the Cavills attempts to refocus humanity’s attention towards space travel. Even as a colony is being established on Mars at the beginning of the 1970’s, dramatic events over the ...

In a penetrating exploration of American hero worship, Hansen addresses the complex legacy of the First Man, as an astronaut and as an individual. In First Man, the personal, technological, epic, and iconic blend to form the portrait of a great but reluctant hero who will forever be known as history's most famous space traveler.

During the early and most dangerous years of the cold war, a handful of Americans, led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, revolutionized spying and warfare. In great secrecy and beyond the prying eyes of Congress and the press, they built exotic new machines that opened up the Soviet Union to surveillance and protected the United States from surprise nuclear attack. Secret Empire is the dramatic story of these men and their inventions, told in full for the first time.

Pro tip: When a bunch of alien cats from outer space start blowing up cities without warning, prior plans may have to be altered. Be prepared to improvise. Yosi Weismann had a simple gig: Babysit a grossly irresponsible young man, who just happened to be a prince. Let His Excellency sow his wild oats. Don’t let him kill himself, or anyone else, in the process. Piece of cake for a man of his skills. A glorified vacation. That's how things were supposed to go, at any rate. Now Yosi is marooned on a foreign world, surrounded by people whom he doesn’t understand, hunted by enemies who ...

Wally Schirra was the only one of the original seven NASA astronauts to command a spacecraft in all three pioneering space programs - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. This chronicle of his experiences takes us into space on Schirra's 1962 Mercury flight that orbited Earth six times and aboard Gemini for the first rendezvous of two manned craft in space.

A slave determined to gain freedom, a widow battling poverty and despair, a man of God grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. They lived in the South during 1865 - a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation. Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail.

In 1954, the US Air Force launched an ambitious program known as WS-117L to develop the world's first reconnaissance satellite. The goal was to take photographic images from space and relay them back to Earth via radio. Because of technical issues and bureaucratic resistance, however, WS-117L was seriously behind schedule by the time Sputnik orbited Earth in 1957 and was eventually cancelled. Eyeing the Red Storm examines the birth of space-based reconnaissance from the perspective of WS-117L.

The first operational military jet in the world, toward the end of the Second World War, the Me 262 was to be the German "miracle weapon". Mano Ziegler was involved from its inception and contributed to the design, testing, training, and even served in it operationally. Could the Me 262 have broken the Allied supremacy in the air? Hitler's Jet Plane fills an important gap in the history of the Luftwaffe and of aviation in general with new research which discloses how the first military jet plane failed to make its mark on World War II.

You’ve heard of the space race, but do you know the whole story? The most ambitious race humankind has ever undertaken was masterminded in the shadows by two engineers on opposite sides of the Cold War - Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi officer living in the US, and Sergei Korolev, a Russian rocket designer once jailed for crimes against his country - and your textbooks probably never told you. From Amy Cherrix comes the extraordinary hidden story of the space race and the bitter rivalry that launched humankind to the moon.

In the 1960s humans took their first steps away from Earth - and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. 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.

The secrets of science meet the drama of the high seas. Amir D. Aczel - the distinguished science writer behind God's Equation and Mystery of the Aleph - turns detective as he uncovers the fascinating story of the invention of the compass.

Captain John Farragut and the crew of the U.S.S. Merrimack face their greatest challenge as Caesar Romulus declares war on the United States of America with a direct attack on Earth. The Merrimack retaliates with an assault on the Roman capital world of Palatine, and in the midst of the chaos, the Hive descends on Earth. With the battle raging, Farragut finds himself in the middle of a final deadly showdown.

The airplane changed the course of history. Above all, it changed the history of the United States. When the Wright brothers invented their flying machine, Americans lived in a nation of two dimensions, circumscribed by lines drawn on a conventional map. A century later, their nation existed - in fact, reigned - in three dimensions. Two million Americans slipped the surly bonds of earth daily, carried aloft by aircraft operating in every part of the world.