Space Technology History

At first glance, it looks like just another auditorium in just another government building. But among the talented men (and later women) who worked in mission control, the room located on the third floor of Building 30—at what is now Johnson Space Center—would become known by many as "the Cathedral." These members of the space program were the brightest of their generations, making split-second decisions that determined the success or failure of a mission.

From a launchpad in Florida to the lunar surface ... Two cartoon flies join listeners as they blast off into space and step foot on the moon with Neil Armstrong, providing a blend of facts and fun while telling the story of a great moment in space-exploration history.

To Conquer the Air is a hero's tale of overcoming obstacles within and without that plumbs the depths of creativity and character. With a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has captured the interplay of remarkable personalities at an extraordinary moment in our history. In the centennial year of human flight, To Conquer the Air is itself a heroic achievement.

Few organizations solve as many impossible problems as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and nobody knows more about leading rocket scientists to unlikely breakthroughs than Adam Steltzner. As the phase lead and development manager for EDL (entry, descent, and landing) of the Curiosity rover to Mars, Steltzner spearheaded the creation of one of engineering's wackiest kluges - the sky crane, which allowed the heaviest rover in the history of space exploration to land on Mars unscathed.

The product of research around the globe and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, God's Equation tells us it is almost as though Einstein were God's mouthpiece, revealing the most fundamental truths about our larger environment, truths scientists are just now confirming.

When three heroic men traveled aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft bound for the moon, the entire world sat glued to their television sets in suspense. But few knew just how much it took to get that far. To put a man on the moon, thousands of people diligently worked behind the scenes. Countless preparations had to be made and no detail, however small, could be overlooked - the lives of the crewmen were at stake.

What's more exciting that spaceships and astronauts? How about a spaceship carrying the first astronauts ever to see the moon first-hand - on Christmas! The year was 1968, and the American people were still reeling from the spacecraft fire that killed the Apollo 1 crew a year earlier. On top of that, there were rumors that the Russian cosmonauts were getting ready to fly around the moon. NASA realized that they needed to take a bold step - and that they needed to take it now.

‘It didn’t matter that they were now three miles beyond their target site, that communications were dropping out and that they were running low on fuel. All that mattered to Neil as he searched for a safe spot to land was that boulders littered the surface below. “Thirty seconds,” called mission control. In truth, the flight controllers were now no more than spectators, just like everybody else. No more needed to be said. It was down to Armstrong

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.

For fans of The Astronaut Wives Club, The Mercury 13 reveals the little-known true story of the remarkable women who trained for NASA space flight. In 1961, just as NASA launched its first man into space, a group of women underwent secret testing in the hopes of becoming America’s first female astronauts. 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 long-awaited audio version of the seminal book by legendary space pioneer, Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, credited with inspiring the likes of Jeff Bezos, Peter Diamandis, and Dylan Taylor.

This is a history of the progress humans made in colonising the solar system between the years 2000 and 3067. It includes descriptions of how our ancestors terraformed Mars and Venus, how they gave these planets atmospheres and oceans, how they used life to make them habitable and how science changed both the people and their machines.

In 1610, Galileo published the Siderius nuncius, or Starry Messenger, a "hurried little masterpiece" in John Heilbron's words. Presenting to the world his remarkable observations using the recently invented telescope, Galileo dramatically challenged our idea of the perfection of the heavens and the centrality of the Earth in the universe. Indeed, the appearance of the little book is regarded as one of the great moments in the history of science.

For a special breed of individual, the call of space is worth the risk it entails: men such as US astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on what was to be a routine 14-week mission maintaining the International Space Station. But then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. With the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts had suddenly lost their ride home.

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.

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.

Today, we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500s - of different nationality, age, religion, and class - collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world. Heaven on Earth is an intimate examination of this scientific family.

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.

Are you captivated by the mysteries of the universe and the minds that unravel them? Eager to understand how a single equation transformed our understanding of everything from atoms to galaxies? Wondering how the thoughts of one visionary could redefine the boundaries of space, time, and reality itself? Dive into the extraordinary life and legacy of Albert Einstein in A Brief History of Albert Einstein - Space, Time, and Quantum Theory: E=mc² and the Foundations of Modern Physics.

As command module pilot of Apollo 17, the last crewed flight to the moon, Ron Evans combined precision flying and painstaking geological observation with moments of delight and enthusiasm. As a patriotic American in charge of command module America, Evans was nicknamed “Captain America” by his fellow crew members.