One of few truly gifted essayists who have turned their talents to science, Wyn Wachhorst here fashions a luminous meditation on the meaning of space exploration from a montage of images and reflections on humanity's dream of spaceflight. In a survey of major figures from Johannes Kepler to Wernher von Braun, he sees in the rise of spaceflight a metaphor of modern history as a recurrent story of transformation and rebirth. Other essays offer new perspectives on the nature of wonder, recall the romantic vision of the decades prior to Sputnik ("nostalgia for a bygone future"), and look at the larger meaning of the moon landing, seeing in spaceflight not only a spiritual quest in the broadest sense of the word, but a cure for the withered capacity for wonder that afflicts the postmodern mind.

On a summer night in 1969, two men climbed down a ladder onto a sea of dust at the edge of an ancient dream. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on lunar soil, the moon ceased to be a place of mystery and myth. It became a destination. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of that journey, Moonbound tells the monumental story of the moon and the men who went there first. With vibrant images and meticulous attention to detail, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm conjures the long history of the visionaries, stargazers, builders, and adventurers who sent Apollo 11 on its legendary voyage. From the wisdom of the Babylonians to the intrigues of the Cold War, from the otherworldly discoveries of Galileo to the dark legacy of Nazi atrocities, from the exhilarating trajectories of astronauts—recounted in their own words—to the unsung brilliance of engineers working behind the scenes, Moonbound captures the grand arc of the Space Age in a graphic history of unprecedented scope and profound lyricism.

For centuries, a journey to space has been a shared dream of millions around the world. We have patiently, and impatiently, anticipated Sunday afternoon drives down celestial freeways. Yet, since 1961 when human space travel began, fewer than 560 professional astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts and a-half dozen millionaires have seen Earth from a vantage point in space. Given so few orbiting travelers, what made so many ordinary people think they had the slightest chance to fulfill their dream? Because for decades, visionaries, government officials, space companies, and the media told us our ticket to ride was just a rocket away. All we had to do was "keep the dream alive." With so much optimism, shouldn't we all be there by now? See You In Orbit? Our Dream of Spaceflight will be the first non-fiction book to take a historical, personal, irreverent, and often-humorous look at the promises, expectations, principal personalities, and milestones regarding the goal and dream we have to fly in space.

This book takes the reader on a journey through the history of extremely ambitious, large and complex space missions that never happened. What were the dreams and expectations of the visionaries behind these plans, and why were they not successful in bringing their projects to reality thus far? As spaceflight development progressed, new technologies and ideas led to pushing the boundaries of engineering and technology though still grounded in real scientific possibilities. Examples are space colonies, nuclear-propelled interplanetary spacecraft, space telescopes consisting of multiple satellites and canon launch systems. Each project described in this book says something about the dreams and expectations of their time, and their demise was often linked to an important change in the cultural, political and social state of the world. For each mission or spacecraft concept, the following will be covered: • Description of the design. • Overview of the history of the concept and the people involved. • Why it was never developed and flown • What if the mission was actually carried out – consequences, further developments, etc.

In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end. Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and cultural atmosphere -- made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. Rocket Dreams is about those solutions...about the places where the space program landed. In Rocket Dreams, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "church" of Noëtic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent. In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space. Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.

The daring, revolutionary NASA that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon has lost its meteoric vision, says journalist and space enthusiast Greg Klerkx. NASA, he contends, has devolved from a pioneer of space exploration into a factionalized bureaucracy focused primarily on its own survival. And as a result, humans haven’t ventured beyond Earth orbit for three decades. Klerkx argues that after its wildly successful Apollo program, NASA clung fiercely to the spotlight by creating a government-sheltered monopoly with a few Big Aerospace companies. Although committed in theory to supporting commercial spaceflight, in practice it smothered vital private-sector innovation. In striking descriptions of space milestones spanning the golden 1960s Space Age and the 2003 Columbia tragedy, Klerkx exposes the “real” NASA and envisions exciting public-private cooperation that could send humans back to the moon and beyond.

This is the first comprehensive book on the European Hermes program. It tells the fascinating story of how Europe aimed for an independent manned spaceflight capability which was to complement US and Soviet/Russian space activities. In 1975, France decided to expand its plans for automated satellites for materials processing to include the development of a small 10 ton spaceplane to be launched on top of a future heavy-lifting Ariane rocket. This Hermes spaceplane would give Europe its own human spaceflight capability for shuttling crews between Earth and space stations. The European Space Agency backed the proposal. Unfortunately, after detailed studies, the project was cancelled in 1993. If Hermes had been introduced into service, it could have become the preferred "space taxi" for ferrying crews to and from the International Space Station. But that opportunity was lost. This book provides the first look of the complete story of and reasons for the demise of this ambitious program. It also gives an account which pieces of Hermes survived and are active in the 2nd decade of the 21st century. This fascinating story will be a great read for space enthusiasts. But it will also serve as a comprehensive documentation of an important episode in the history of manned spaceflight.