Space History

I’m Rishi Tremayne. I’m fifteen, female and desperately working to take care of my sick family. I hunt wrecked spaceships, destroyed in battle during the Slave War and turn in their location for credits - credits I desperately need. Yeah, I know I used that word twice, so it's doubly true. If I don’t find hulls. . . we don’t eat. . . or pay rent. . . or get the necessary meds my family needs to block the excruciating pain they suffer from that dreaded nerve disease. I sometimes get into trouble finding those ships. And, yeah, I also get into trouble with my. . . attitude. Sometimes....

After falling in love with the king's intended, Lewis Deathstalker is now exiled, an outlaw from the empire he faithfully served for so long. With Lewis out of the way, former Paragon Finn Durandal has led a silent coup to wrest control from the king and set himself up as the power behind the throne. But Durandal is not the Empire's biggest threat. The Terror that Owen Deathstalker prophesied nearly 200 years ago is almost upon them, and Owen is supposedly the only one who can save civilization from unspeakable horrors.

Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour - 10 times faster than a rifle bullet - Yuri Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows, he sees the Earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing, he has become a world celebrity - the first human to leave the planet. Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary.

Humans from the earliest civilizations were spellbound by the night sky - craning their necks each night, they used the stars to orient themselves in the large, strange world around them. Stargazing is a pursuit that continues to fascinate us: from Copernicus to Carl Sagan, astronomers throughout history have spent their lives trying to answer the biggest questions in the universe. Now, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque shares the stories of modern-day stargazers.

A deeply panoramic tour of the night, from its brightest spots to the darkest skies we have left. A starry night is one of nature's most magical wonders. Yet in our artificially lit world, three-quarters of Americans' eyes never switch to night vision and most of us no longer experience true darkness. In The End of Night, Paul Bogard restores our awareness of the spectacularly primal, wildly dark night sky and how it has influenced the human experience across everything from science to art.

My beginner's book is your ticket to one of the coolest and most mysterious subjects out there. This isn't your average physics book. It's a portal to understanding the stuff that makes up... well, everything! Subatomic particles. Do not let their size fool you; they have a massive impact on the world around you—the fundamental part of how everything works and not as complex as you might fear.

With the Soviet Union's launch of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, the Cold War soared to new heights as Americans feared losing the race into space. The X-15 Rocket Plane tells the enthralling yet little-known story of the hypersonic X-15, the winged rocket ship that met this challenge and opened the way into human-controlled spaceflight. Drawing on interviews with those who were there, Michelle Evans captures the drama and excitement of, yes, rocket science.

For many, the moon landing was the defining event of the twentieth century. So it seems only fitting that Norman Mailer - the literary provocateur who altered the landscape of American nonfiction - wrote the most wide-ranging, far-seeing chronicle of the Apollo 11 mission. A classic chronicle of America's reach for greatness in the midst of the Cold War, Of a Fire on the Moon compiles the reportage Mailer published between 1969 and 1970 in Life magazine

Humanity's first reusable spacecraft and the most complex machine ever built, NASA's space shuttle debuted with great promise and as a dependable source of wonder and national pride. But with the Challenger catastrophe in 1986, the whole space shuttle program came into question, as did NASA itself, so long an institution that was seemingly above reproach. Wheels Stop tells the stirring story of how, after the Challenger disaster, the space shuttle not only recovered but went on to perform its greatest missions.

As a young man growing up in early twentieth- century Germany, Arthur Waldmann is introduced to the mysteries of the Jewish Kabbalah by his eccentric grandmother, and dreams of traveling to a Heavenly Academy of ancient sages in a distant galaxy. When he discovers that he cannot achieve this goal by spiritual means, he decides he will reach for the stars through the emerging technology of rocket propulsion. Waldmann comes to believe that he is the chosen one to lead mankind's conquest of space, but soon discovers he must confront brilliant rivals with equal claim to the title, one of whom ...

For as long as humans have lived, we have lived beneath the stars. But under the glow of today’s artificial lighting, we have lost the intimacy our ancestors once shared with the cosmos. In Starborn, cosmologist Roberto Trotta reveals how stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization. The stars have served as our timekeepers, our navigators, our muses—they were once even our gods. How radically different would we be, Trotta also asks, if our ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen… nothing?

In Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant tells for the first time the full story of the 100-year quest to decipher the ancient Greek computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Along the way she unearths a diverse cast of remarkable characters and explores the deep roots of modern technology in ancient Greece and the medieval European and Islamic worlds. At its heart, this is an epic adventure and mystery, a book that challenges our assumptions about technology through the ages.

This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past. Combining elements of Rocket Boys and Elegant Universe, Time Traveler follows Mallett's discovery of Einstein's work on space-time, his study of Godel's work on a solution of Einstein's equation that might allow for time travel.

The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly - a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city like a butterfly's wings - Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings.

Spaceflight is one of the greatest human achievements of the 20th century. The Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957; less than 12 years later, the American Apollo astronauts landed on the moon.

Social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women’s innovations, from well-known, movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool.

The sun's family of planets become a familiar place in this personal account of the lives of other worlds. Sobel explores the planets' origins and oddities through the lens of popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history. This intimate account is filled with fascination, beauty, and surprise.

In 1929, a 22-year-old maverick named Frank Whittle - a self-taught aeronautical obsessive and risk-takingly brilliant RAF pilot - presented a blueprint for a revolutionary, jet-powered aircraft engine to the Air Ministry. His idea had the potential to change the course of history, but it was summarily rejected. In this meticulously researched biography, Duncan Campbell-Smith charts Whittle's stoic efforts to build his jet engine in the interwar years.

As smartphones, supercomputers, supercolliders, and AI propel us into an ever more unfamiliar future, How to Speak Science takes us on a rollicking historical tour of the greatest discoveries and ideas that make today's cutting-edge technologies possible. Wanting everyone to be able to "speak" science, YouTube science guru Bruce Benamran explains - as accessibly and wittily as in his acclaimed videos - the fundamental ideas of the physical world: matter, life, the solar system, light, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, and much more.

In the Shadow of the Moon tells the story of the most exciting and challenging years in spaceflight, with two superpowers engaged in a titanic struggle to land one of their own people on the moon. Drawing on interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, their families, technicians, and scientists, as well as rarely seen Soviet and American government documents, the authors craft a remarkable story of the golden age of spaceflight as both an intimate human experience and a rollicking global adventure.