Space Memoir

On January 28, 1986, NASA space shuttle orbiter Challenger lifted off into the clear blue skies over Florida on mission STS-51L, carrying a crew of seven, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. Just 73 seconds into the launch, a massive explosion tore Challenger apart. This newly revised edition of Teacher in Space tells the story of how McAuliffe graduated from her role as a much-loved high schoolteacher to occupying a seat on the veteran orbiter’s 10th and last flight into space.

In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built.

In 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. Suddenly Silicon Valley, not NASA, was the epicentre of the new Space Age. Start-ups and investors began to realise that the heavens - ungoverned and unregulated - were open for business. When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied race to control access to outer space. Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies - Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs and Rocket Lab - as they attempt to launch thousands of low-cost rockets and satellites into orbit.

In 1961, Wally Funk was among the Mercury 13, the first group of American pilots to pass the ‘Women in Space’ programme. Wally sailed through a series of rigorous physical and mental tests, her scores beating many of the male candidates, including those of John Glenn, the first American in orbit. But just one week before she was due to enter the final phase of training, the programme was abruptly cancelled. A combination of politics and prejudice meant that none of the women ever flew into space.

When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person. He was neither. In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity's greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn't rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires.

People like to say, "It's not rocket science." But Fallingstar's father designed space rockets and satellites, so in her childhood it was all rocket science. Fallingstar's rollicking trajectory from a Republican cold war upbringing to Pagan Priestess is a unique, yet utterly relatable portrait of a culture growing from denial to awareness.

Directing his polemics against the pedantry of his time, Galileo, as his own popularizer, addressed his writings to contemporary laymen. His support of Copernican cosmology, against the Church’s strong opposition, his development of a telescope, and his unorthodox opinions as a philosopher of science were the central concerns of his career and the subjects of four of his most important writings. Drake’s introductory essay place them in their biographical and historical context.

Galileo's oldest child was 13 when he placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her support was her father's greatest source of strength. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose 17th-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion.

As a minority in a predominantly white institution, taking up space is an act of resistance. And in higher education, feeling like you constantly have to justify your existence within institutions that weren't made for you is an ongoing struggle for many people. Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi, two recent Cambridge graduates, wrote Taking Up Space as a guide and a manifesto for change: tackling issues of access, unrepresentative curricula, discrimination in the classroom, the problems of activism and life before and after university.

En este audiolibro, Sara García Alonso -primera astronauta española de la Agencia Espacial Europea- comparte su particular experiencia, salpicada de anécdotas personales, para ofrecernos claves sobre cómo plantear y afrontar los desafíos. Con un testimonio inspirador y vitalista, la autora fusiona ensayo, ficción y autobiografía para reflexionar sobre los impulsos que nos guían a lo largo de la vida y moldean nuestra forma de ver el mundo, al tiempo que nos alienta a no rendirnos nunca en la persecución de nuestros sueños.

In Happy Fat, comedian Sofie Hagen describes how she conquered a negative relationship with her body and provides practical tips for readers to do the same. She exposes how fatphobia is embedded in society at every level - in our relationships, our public spaces, and the TV shows we watch - powered by the toxic mix of capitalism and the media.

The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical narratives by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. This audiobook vividly describes how, before 1900, a woman who wanted to study the stars had to have a father, brother, or husband to provide entry, and how the considerable intellectual skills of women astronomers were still not enough to enable them to pry open doors of opportunity for much of the twentieth century. After decades of difficult struggles, women are closer to equality in astronomy than ever before.

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty.

"The name’s James, Richard James. In 1994 I played a part in a TV series called Space Precinct. Now? Well, let’s just say I’ve written a book about it...."

Thirty years ago a flying saucer hovered over the little town of Mart, Texas. Martites looked up and saw it, and a few took photos of it. When a newspaper asked the mayor of Mart about it, he said, "IT couldn't have been much or it would have never come to Mart." But the Mayor may have been wrong, for Martians may well have visited Mart back in the 1950s, when the author of this book was growing up there. Childhood betrayals, incessant drought, unreasonable parents, dogmatic grammarians, and kids who just didn't fit in might have all been engineered by visiting but invisible creatures from ...

Why don’t we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented his computing machine, and because the developers of the far-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas from him. Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of John Atanasoff with technical clarity and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.

Antes de conquistar Marte, debemos aprender a sobrevivir en el espacio. Un libro ejemplar sobre el triunfo de la imaginación humana, la fuerza de voluntad y las maravillas infinitas de la galaxia. Scott Kelly es el hombre que más tiempo ha pasado en el espacio, 340 días, durante los cuales ha visto y vivido cosas que prácticamente ninguno de nosotros veremos o experimentaremos nunca.

The first popular introduction to Hawking's work, this program discusses the mysterious world of black holes, singularities, and the "big bang"--the point at which our universe may have begun.

Trained as a musician, amateur scientist William Herschel found international fame after discovering the planet Uranus in 1781. Though he is still best known for this finding, his partnership with his sister Caroline yielded groundbreaking work, including techniques that remain in use today. The duo pioneered comprehensive surveys of the night sky, carefully categorizing every visible object in the void. Caroline wrote an influential catalogue of nebulae, and William discovered infrared radiation.

Her Space, Her Time shares the stories of women in physics and astronomy whose work expanded scientific understanding yet whose accomplishments are often overlooked—creating a thrilling account of scientific discovery, inspirational leadership and persistence in the face of overwhelming challenges. In shaping her narrative around the science that fascinated them and the social context in which they worked, award-winning quantum physicist Shohini Ghose champions these remarkable women’s contributions, which loom even larger given the misogyny and discrimination they faced.