Humankind's first lunar landing is narrated by rare official documentation, collected for the first time in this volume.

A small metal sphere weighing slightly more than 83 kilograms was placed into an elliptical orbit by the mighty R-7 rocket. It was perhaps one of the most significant moments in human history. The date was October 4th 1957 and the sphere was called Sputnik.

When the world's first artificial satellite sped across the night skies the impact was far-reaching and profound. Not only was this clearly one of the great scientific achievements of the modern age but it was also a catalyst which would propel the United States out of its post-War lethargy. The Political significance of the lift-capability of the R-7 rocket aroused the attentions of the West while irrevocably altering the face of human history. The Space Age had begun. The story of the R-7 rocket and its many offspring is one which still remains a mystery in the West. Now in the post-Cold war era the remarkable accomplishments of the engineers of Rocket & Space Corporation Energia are finally reaching eager readers in the West.

The pages within contain a pictorial record encompassing the entire history of the Russian space programme, from its inception at the end of World War II to the present day.

The sheer wealth of original and durable technology is a testament to the ingenuity of a remarkable people and gives a unique glimpse a the future of the historic partnership between East and West.

Published for the first time completely in English, Rocket & Space Corporation Energia features rare pictures and diagrams including:

Sputnik - Yuri Gagarin's Vostok capsule - the world's first Space Stations - the enormous lunar rocket N1 - Russia's interplanetary probes and the Buran shuttle.

In 1969, Michael Collins went to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the historic Apollo 11 flight. When he came back, he wrote the finest account we have of the training and the experiences of a test pilot and astronaut. This is the story of one of the great adventures of this century.

First published in 1974
New epilogue by the author
Drawings, color and b&w photos

In April 1970, during the glory days of the Apollo space program, NASA sent Navy Captain Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America's fifth mission to the moon. Only fifty-five hours into the flight of Apollo 13, disaster struck: a mysterious explosion rocked the ship, and soon its oxygen and power began draining away. Commander Lovell and his crew watched in alarm as the cockpit grew darker, the air grew thinner, and the instruments winked out one by one. The full story of the moon shot that almost ended in catastrophe has never been told, but now Lovell and coauthor Jeffrey Kluger bring it to vivd life. What begins as a smooth flight is transformed into a hair-raising voyage from the moment Lovell calls out, "Houston, we've got a problem." Minutes after the explosion, the astronauts are forced to abandon the main ship for the lunar module, a tiny craft designed to keep two men alive for just two days. But there are three men aboard, and they are four days from home. As the hours tick away, the narrative shifts from the crippled spacecraft to Mission Control, from engineers searching desperately for solutions to Lovell's wife and children praying for his safe return. The entire nation watches as one crisis after another is met and overcome. By the time the ship splashes down in the Pacific, we understand why the heroic effort to rescue Lovell and his crew is considered by many to be NASA's finest hour. This riveting book puts the reader right in the spacecraft during one of the worst disasters in the history of space exploration. Written with all the color and drama of the best fiction, Lost Moon is the true story of a thrilling adventure and an astonishing triumph over nearly impossible odds. It was a major Oscar(R)-nominated motion picture directed by Ron Howard and starred Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon.

This visually stunning book with over 250 full-color illustrations, many of them never before published, is based on Carl Sagan’s thirteen-part television series. Told with Sagan’s remarkable ability to make scientific ideas both comprehensible and exciting, Cosmos is about science in its broadest human context, how science and civilization grew up together.

The book also explores spacecraft missions of discovery of the nearby planets, the research in the Library of ancient Alexandria, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the origin of life, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies and the origins of matter, suns and worlds.

Sagan retraces the fifteen billion years of cos-mic evolution that have transformed matter into life and consciousness, enabling the Cosmos to wonder about itself. He considers the latest findings on life elsewhere and how we might communicate with the beings of other worlds.

Cosmos is the story of our long journey of discovery and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science, including Democritus, Hypatia, Kepler, Newton, Huy-gens, Champollion, Lowell and Humason. Sagan looks at our planet from an extra-terrestrial vantage point and sees a blue jewel-like world, inhabited by a lifeform that is just beginning to discover its own unity and to ven-ture into the vast ocean of space.

This book is an exploration of these strange visitors to our skies.

Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy

The most thrilling of all journeys—the missions of the Apollo astronauts to the surface of the Moon and back—yielded 32,000 extraordinarily beautiful photographs, the record of a unique human achievement. Until recently, only a handful of these photographs had been released for publication; but now, for the first time, NASA has allowed a selection of the master negatives and transparencies to be scanned electronically, rendering the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. Michael Light has woven 129 of these stunningly clear images into a single composite voyage, a narrative of breathtaking immediacy and authenticity that begins with the launch and is followed by a walk in space, an orbit of the Moon, a lunar landing and exploration, and a return to Earth with an orbit and splashdown.

     Graced by five 45-inch-wide gatefolds that display the lunar landscape, from above the surface and at eye level, in unprecedented detail and clarity, Full Moon conveys on each page the excitement, disorientation, and awe that the astronauts themselves felt as they were shot into space and then as they explored an alien landscape and looked back at their home planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Published on the thirtieth anniversary of Apollo 11—the first landing on the Moon—this remarkable and mesmerizing volume is, like the voyages it commemorates and re-creates, an experience both intimate and monumental.

1999 Hardcover Edition

Chaikin is the only person to interview all 12 moonwalkers and get their personal feelings about everything from astronaut & crew selection, training, peer relations and best of all; orbiting and walking the moon. This is not a technical or scientific history, but an account of how the astronauts FELT about their entire Apollo experiences. You can easily "walk in their shoes" and "see through their eyes" with this book. He writes in a way all persons can understand, and simplifies the engineering and scientific aspects so you can understand what the astronauts were dealing with. Not only does he avoid getting bogged down in techical speak, but actually makes the technical parts fascinating to learn!

Chaikin is the only person to interview all 12 moonwalkers and get their personal feelings about everything from astronaut & crew selection, training, peer relations and best of all; orbiting and walking the moon. This is not a technical or scientific history, but an account of how the astronauts FELT about their entire Apollo experiences. You can easily "walk in their shoes" and "see through their eyes" with this book. He writes in a way all persons can understand, and simplifies the engineering and scientific aspects so you can understand what the astronauts were dealing with. Not only does he avoid getting bogged down in techical speak, but actually makes the technical parts fascinating to learn!

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.