Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969) was the first installment of one of the most successful and longest-running television franchises of all time. Today, Trek fans champion its writing, progressive social consciousness, and aesthetic. Designing the Final Frontier is a unique, expert look at the mid-century modern design that created and inspired that aesthetic. From Burke chairs to amorphous sculptures, from bright colors to futuristic frames, Star Trek TOS is bursting with mid-century modern furniture, art, and design elements—many of them bought directly from famous design showrooms. Together, midcentury modern design experts Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire have created an insider’s guide to the interior of original starship Enterprise and beyond, that is sure to attract Star Trek’s thriving global fan base.

What are our motivations for going into space? Where does our long-term space future lie? Why, and how, should we strive to reach, if not for the stars, at least for the Moon and Mars? This exciting book looks first at the progress that has already been made in our attempts to explore and expand beyond the Earth. Current and past space technologies and space stations are described, and the effects of the space environment on the human body are explained. A discussion of the merits of the robotic exploration of space is followed by a look at our exploration of the Moon and Mars. Final chapters touch on propulsion methods required for leaving our solar system, and ask which of the possibilities for future space travel is most likely to succeed. This thought provoking book will appeal to all those with an interest in the future of space exploration.

The vast and mysterious universe is explored in this reprint anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year). The urge to explore and discover is a natural and universal one, and the edge of the unknown is expanded with each passing year as scientific advancements inch us closer and closer to the outer reaches of our solar system and the galaxies beyond them. Generations of writers have explored these new frontiers and the endless possibilities they present in great detail. With galaxy-spanning adventures of discovery and adventure, from generations ships to warp drives, exploring new worlds to first contacts, science fiction writers have given readers increasingly new and alien ways to look out into our broad and sprawling universe. The Final Frontier delivers stories from across this literary spectrum, a reminder that the universe is far large and brimming with possibilities than we could ever imagine, as hard as we may try.

The proposed book uses the Star Trek television/movie and Star Wars movie series to explain key international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of science fiction in literature and film/television. It then presents the development of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, and discusses how their progression through time has illustrated key IR theories and concepts. As a bonus, it compares the two franchises to another recent science fiction franchise used to teach IR (Battlestar Galactica).

Stunned by the news of Sputnik in 1957, the American public were to be treated over the next dozen years to the spectacle of an all-out national crusade: the race to beat the Russians to the moon. What few understood at the time - and what has largely been obscured in popular representations of this episode in movies and bestsellers - was the key economic and technical role played by manned space exploration in post-war US capitalist expansion. From Potsdam to Cape Canaveral, the yellow brick road twisted and turned, but its ultimate goal remained clear: the Oz of global American economic and political domination. Taking off from that masterpiece of American fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Dale Carter tells the lurid tale of the postwar boom, through the history of the manned space program. Salvaged from the ashes of Nazi Germany (Pynchon's 'Oven State'), as US officials rounded up the Third Reich's leading V-2 scientists, the American Rocket State embarked on an upward path that would culminate in the epochal voyage of Apollo XI in 1969. Following this path, Carter gives an innovative, brilliant account of American culture and society during the Cold War. He charts the ideological and political significance of a range of phenomena, from films like High Society, Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide to John F. Kennedy's rise to power, from the emergence of a new high-tech economy fueled by the NASA-led transformation of the aerospace industry to the last flight of the space shuttle Challenger. His highly original account of the star-spangled space age sets a new standard for the study of American culture.

In the graphic novel Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier, Jim Ottaviani and illustrator Maris Wicks capture the great humor and incredible drive of Mary Cleave, Valentina Tereshkova, and the first women in space. The U.S. may have put the first man on the moon, but it was the Soviet space program that made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. It took years to catch up, but soon NASA’s first female astronauts were racing past milestones of their own. The trail-blazing women of Group 9, NASA’s first mixed gender class, had the challenging task of convincing the powers that be that a woman’s place is in space, but they discovered that NASA had plenty to learn about how to make space travel possible for everyone.

Fight for the Final Frontier uses the concepts associated with irregular warfare to offer new insights for understanding the nature of strategic competition in space. Today’s most pressing security concerns are best considered using an irregular warfare lens because incidents and points of potential conflict fall outside the definition of armed conflict. While some universal rules of combat apply across all domains, conflict in space up-ends and flips those assumed standards of understanding. John Klein provides a solution to reckoning with the many malicious, nefarious, and irresponsible behaviors in the space domain by using the irregular warfare framework. This offers a new paradigm through which one can view and study conflict, outside traditional combat, involving state and non-state actors. A “war” in space will be utterly unlike any that have happened on Earth, though scholars can provide lessons from past conflict to understand the flashpoints in the heavens. Providing the needed foundational understanding, Fight for the Final Frontier makes the case that irregular warfare in the space domain is shaped by the fundamental nature of all warfare, along with universal principles of strategy and the essential unity of all strategic experience. Going one step further, John Klein outlines the new arenas for battle, new areas of conflict and competition, and the necessary concepts for operating in this bold new frontier.