Space Memoir

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.

Deborah Santana is best known for her marriage to music icon Carlos Santana - a 30-year bond that endures to this day. But as a girl growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s, daughter of a White mother and a Black father - the legendary blues guitarist Saunders King - her life was charged with its own drama long before she married.

Wally Schirra was the only one of the original seven NASA astronauts to command a spacecraft in all three pioneering space programs - Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. This chronicle of his experiences takes us into space on Schirra's 1962 Mercury flight that orbited Earth six times and aboard Gemini for the first rendezvous of two manned craft in space.

Editor especializado em ciência, Samuel Graydon desafiou-se a encontrar a essência do grande cientista que redefiniu nossa visão do Universo. O resultado é esta biografia-mosaico com 99 histórias que vão da infância à maturidade, com glórias e fracassos, dores e alegrias do homem que virou sinônimo de genialidade.

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.

09.07 am. 12 de abril de 1961. Un cohete de alto secreto en la URSS. Un joven ruso se sienta en una minúscula cápsula encima del misil balístico intercontinental más potente de la Unión Soviética -diseñado originalmente para transportar una cabeza nuclear- y despega hacia el cielo. Se llama Yuri Gagarin. Y está a punto de hacer historia.

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.

Ted Swartz and his Ted & Company TheaterWorks team are known for blending Bible stories with comedy and poignancy, and pushing the envelope on issues of faith and social justice. But who is Ted Swartz? Follow along in this engaging memoir as Swartz finds his way as a middle child in an eastern Pennsylvania traditional Mennonite home to his early work in the family butcher shop. Journey with Ted through the decision of uprooting his young family to attend seminary and then embracing life as a writer and actor.

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. Here are the stories of the tough and determined women who flung the doors wide open.

Get up close and personal with science as Andrew Kessler narrates his hilarious journey inside NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission - a historic enterprise manned by a motley crew of rocket scientists. The Phoenix Mars mission was the first man-made probe ever sent to the Martian arctic.

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.

Julia Child's 20' x 14' kitchen was a serious workspace and recipe-testing lab that exuded a sense of mid-century homey comfort. Now, it has been on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, for most of the past twenty years. Between lively narrative and detailed commentary on Julia's favorite kitchen gadgets, Julia Child's Kitchen illuminates the stories behind the room's design, use, significance, and legacy, showing how deeply Julia Child continues to influence food today.

Against the backdrop of the late Cold War, a tiny American start-up company forged a secret deal to place American scientific payloads aboard the Soviet space station MIR. Born out of sheer desperation after the Challenger explosion and grounding of the United States space shuttle program, the agreement was negotiated and approved behind the backs of NASA and Congress, with the help of United States government officials inside the Commerce and Defense departments.

W czasach Kopernika nic nie wskazywało na to, że do największej naukowej rewolucji dojdzie w Europie. O gwiazdach Chińczycy i Arabowie wiedzieli więcej, ale to my jako pierwsi zrozumieliśmy, jakie jest miejsce Ziemi w kosmosie. Ktoś może powiedzieć, że to przede wszystkim zasługa Keplera, Galileusza, Newtona–ale gdybyśmy zapytali tych panów o zdanie, wskazaliby na dzieło bardzo skromnego, genialnego uczonego, który by pracować w spokoju nad swoim odkryciem, zaszył się na skraju Europy.

In his final book, Helias Doundoulakis demystifies Arecibo for the novice, from dreams to drawings. The chronological account of the iconic telescope is made plain for all to see, which spanned six decades. Read how his brother, George Doundoulakis, undertook its conception and fielding, finally winning patent rights for his brother Helias, CIA director William Casey, and Gus Michalos. Follow the inseparable brothers on their journey of courage, inspiration, and brilliance that advanced the design of Arecibo and inspired generations of space scientists for years to come.

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

Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the 20th century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called "the day without yesterday".

Christopher A. Roosa grew up the eldest son of Apollo 14 astronaut and command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa. As a child of the space program, Christopher had a ringside seat at the dinner table of one of twenty-four Americans who had either entered lunar orbit or landed on the moon.

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.