Space History

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: Rocket Scientist Killed in Pasadena Explosion. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

NASA’s history is a familiar story, one that typically peaks with Neil Armstrong taking his small step on the Moon in 1969. But America’s space agency wasn’t created in a vacuum. It was assembled from pre-existing parts, drawing together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. Breaking the Chains of Gravity tells the story of America’s nascent space program, its scientific advances, its personalities and the rivalries it caused between the various arms of the US military.

A talk by Terence McKenna about how our global culture is preparing to depart for the stars, so we must begin to pack for the trip. He begins with a discussion of botanical dimensions of folk medicine which are lost in pharmacology and how this is being uncovered by the New Age archaic revival. McKenna envisions an end to the current age, which has consisted of eons of boredom. He goes on to discuss the growing wonder of the universe as presented by leading astronomers Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.

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.

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.

Walk in Hell is the incredible second book of best-selling author Harry Turtledove’s alternate history tetralogy of World War I, The Great War. The first book, American Front, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of 1998.

In this startlingly vivid portrait of a world torn apart by war and strife, the Confederate States of America ally with Britain and France, while the United States sides with Germany in a World War I that might have been.

In this deeply original book, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy sets out in search of the telescopes and detectors that promise to answer the biggest questions in modern cosmology. Why is the universe expanding at an ever faster rate? What is the nature of the "dark matter" that makes up almost a quarter of the universe? Why does the universe appear fine-tuned for life? Are there others besides our own?

Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein's project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe's structure and origin. The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world's largest scientific endeavors.

In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted Pluto out of planethood. Far from the sun, tiny, and eccentric in orbit, it's a wonder Pluto has any fans. Yet during the mounting debate over Pluto's status, Americans rallied behind the extraterrestrial underdog.

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems compares the Copernican or Heliocentric system with the Ptolemaic or Peripatetic, system of the cosmos. Published in Florence in 1632, it resulted in him being tried before the Inquisition. Using the dialogue form, Galileo masterfully shows the truth of the Copernican system that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The Dialogue is one of the most important treatises ever written. A work of supreme clarity and accessibility, it remains as accessible now as when it was published.

Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel tells the riveting story of the female pilots who each dreamed of being the first American woman in space. When the space age dawned in the late 1950s, Jackie Cochran held more propeller and jet flying records than any pilot of the twentieth century—man...

On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation's eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history.

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.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

The year is 1961. The Cold War is in full swing and the space race is on. Russia aims to send humanity to space. But what if space comes to humanity instead? Yuri Gagarin’s epic flight into space is disrupted when an alien Mothership jumps into orbit, causing a cosmic car crash that defies all odds. Everything changes. The US and USSR must quickly put aside their differences. In exchange for the Earth’s help in the rebuilding of their Mothership, the mysterious aliens, the Vulbathi, offer promises of technology beyond humanity's wildest dreams.

Thomas and Andy (the We Love You guys) provide you with a guidebook to deepen your relationship with nature—scratch that…your relationship with yourself—scratch that…your relationship with everything. In this audiobook, these lifelong best friends explore nature as they talk, laugh, and...

The riveting conclusion to Scott Westerfeld’s New York Times bestselling trilogy that’s “sure to become a classic” (School Library Journal). Alek and Deryn are on the last leg of their round-the-world quest to end World War I, reclaim Alek’s throne as prince of Austria, and finally...

If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising recreates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon.

Hannah is a fusion scientist working alone at a remote cottage off the coast of Scotland when she sees a figure making his way from the sea. It is a young man from a human settlement on Mars, traveling backwards through time to try to make a crucial intervention in the fate of our dying planet, and he needs Hannah's help. Hannah and the stranger are on the path towards a breakthrough—and then things go terribly wrong.

The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes—and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing. Pillars of Creation tells the story of...