Space History

Today's mission: Challenge your knowledge of planets, comets, stars, and more with this exciting quiz. The three-book series is now all in one! If you're looking for a fun, engaging way to challenge your knowledge of outer space, then you need this fact-filled trivia book! You can quiz friends and family during a galactic trivia night. If a question stumps you, we include the answer and multiple facts with every quiz so you can also brush up on your knowledge.

Built of titanium and a chrome-nickel alloy known as Inconel X, the X-15 was the fastest plane ever built, streaking through the lower reaches of outer space even before the first space capsules reached orbit. First tested in 1959, the X-15 proved to be a crucial testing ground for the astronauts and hardware in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle programs. Celebrated reporter Richard Tregaskis spent time with the pilots, engineers, and other key personnel involved in the project.

Fatal Flight brings vividly to life the year of operation of R.101, the last great British airship - a luxury liner three and a half times the length of a 747 jet, with a spacious lounge, a dining room that seated 50, glass-walled promenade decks, and a smoking room.

The center of political and commercial interaction in the Ancient Greek polis was the agora. The word essentially means a gathering place or an open space, and in all Greek city states, the agora was central to all aspects of daily life and commerce. As the agora developed as a civic space, particularly from the sixth century BCE onward in Athens, the architectural splendor of the buildings associated with it became an ever more obvious demonstration of the power and glory of Athenian democracy.

Project Gemini is a neglected part of the US space program. Sandwiched between the excitement of Project Mercury and the sending of the first American astronauts to space and the euphoria of the Apollo Moon landings, Gemini was a step forward rather than a dramatic leap. However, this project achieved many important firsts, including the first spacewalk, the first rendezvous and docking between two spacecraft, the first flights of more than one week’s duration, and many more.

Jerrod Northi-rogue, pirate and a citizen of Pemath, was desperate enough to want to go through the transformation. It cost 100,000 units for the Craftsmen to endow him with the Seven Signs - a rather steep price even for him. But he would pay it somehow, for since the attack of the deadly leeris, he feared that the cost of missing this opportunity to find a refuge in the land of Tarnis would be even higher.

Three hundred million years ago, the galactic community was taken by surprise. A catastrophic war with a hostile entity threatened to destroy all life until the fight was postponed by a calamitous event known as the Great Conflation. With the majority of pre-Conflation empires in ruins and the Ascended Biologicals wiped out, the hastily formed Wanderer Enclave tasked its fleet with unearthing answers and continuing the fight. One lone ship has found something: an innocuous world it had marked for routine decontamination that may hold vital answers.

Welcome to the Mirror Empires, where reality is distorted, and war threatens to engulf the world. It is 1898, and soldiers armed with the latest weapons clash with the unstoppable power of the Sky Lords and their aerial armadas in new and uncharted realms. Jack never expected to spend his 19th birthday crashing a stolen flying machine into the middle of a war. But when he saw soldiers with bolt-action rifles up against an advanced species, he knew he’d found something incredible.

Travel to and from Mars has long been a staple of science fiction. And yet the hurdles - both technological and financial - have kept human exploration of the red planet from becoming a reality. Trailblazing Mars offers an inside look at the current efforts to fulfill this dream. Award-winning journalist Pat Duggins examines the extreme new challenges that will be faced by astronauts on the journey there and back. They'll have to grow their own food, find their own water - and solve their own problems.

Celebrate the greatest saga ever told: All of us who are deeply influenced by the epic saga of Star Wars have our favorite moments. Each time the screen goes black and you see those words - "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" - the music blasts through you, and you're a kid again. Ken Napzok, expert appreciator of Star Wars, counts down each one of those special moments that makes this series not just the best movies of all time, but the greatest saga ever told.

By the time the Hubble telescope reached orbit, it was already the world’s most famous telescope, but it was also the most scorned. The telescope cost nearly two billion dollars more to complete than anticipated, and to make matters worse, the first images it sent back were skewed. However, within about a year of fixing it, the telescope captured images of a major event in the solar system.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 "winning" the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the solar system. Moreover, the notion that America "won" the Space Race at the end of the 1960s overlooks just how competitive the Space Race actually was in launching people into orbit.

Het laatste boek van professor Stephen Hawking. Hoe is alles begonnen? Is er intelligent leven elders in het heelal? Kunnen we de toekomst voorspellen? Bestaat er een God? Wat zit er in een zwart gat? Zijn tijdreizen mogelijk? Zullen we overleven op aarde? Moeten we de ruimte koloniseren? Zal kunstmatige intelligentie slimmer worden dan wij? Hoe geven wij de toekomst vorm? De wereldberoemde wetenschapper en bestsellerauteur Stephen Hawking laat ons zijn laatste ideeën over de grootste vragen van het universum na in dit briljante postuum uitgegeven werk.

At the end of book one, Prospectors!, Sam and his partner Calvin found themselves stranded in a remote crater, down to their last cylinder of air. In book two, they are dramatically rescued by the men of The Deirdre, an ice mine on the crater’s rim, and forced into indentured servitude, digging for ice deep under the surface of the Moon. But when the Deirdres jump a neighboring claim, and no-nonsense Calvin hears the cries of a long-dead miner on his radio, life inside the Moon turns deadly, and soon Sam needs all of his wits, and a six-gun, to stay alive.

This Fleeting World tells the story of the universe and history of humanity. Prize-winning historian David Christian covers it all in this compact, accessible, and inspiring guide to the history of everything from stars and empires to cities to the World Wide Web, capitalism, and globalization. David Christian's approach to human history and big history is a call to action based on a profound and fresh understanding of our place in the universe.

A fascinating piece of historical scientific writing, written in 1913 by E. Walter Maunder (F.R.A.S.), the superintendent of the Solar Dept. at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The book is a snapshot in time showing the evolution of thinking on the solar system and cosmology. The author considers, in fine detail, the plausibility of life on other planets within our solar system, the requirements for such life, and the barriers that life faces.

The world of science has been transformed. Where once astronomers sat at the controls of giant telescopes in remote locations, praying for clear skies, now they have no need to budge from their desks, as data arrives in their inbox. And what they receive is overwhelming; projects now being built provide more data in a few nights than in the whole of humanities' history of observing the universe.

On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on the Space Shuttle Program’s 35th mission, but this was no ordinary mission. In its payload bay, Discovery was carrying the Hubble Space Telescope, with the objective of putting the telescope into orbit. By the time the Hubble telescope reached orbit, it was already the world’s most famous telescope, but it was also the most scorned. The telescope cost nearly $2 billion more to complete than anticipated, and to make matters worse, the first images it sent back were skewed.

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock for a legendary music festival. For Neil M. Maher, the conjunction of these two era-defining events is not entirely coincidental. With its lavishly funded mandate to send a man to the moon, Apollo became a litmus test in the 1960s culture wars.

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.