"Have you ever heard of the 'Mercury 13' women? Did you know that nearly twenty years before the first women were let into NASA's astronaut program, there were others who tried? What are the requirements for being shot into space, piloting a hunk of metal while carrying the hopes and fears of your nation? Mastery of flying, as well as courage, intelligence, resistance to stress, and fitness -- any checklist would certainly includes these. But when...

Lily Lupino yearns to be an astronaut, so when Kosmo Kidd crash-lands in her Brooklyn kitchen in 1949, she will do almost anything to prove herself to him and his crew.

"A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile--originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead--and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history. Traveling at almost 18,000 miles per hour--ten times faster than a rifle bullet--Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing...

"Human beings are natural explorers, and nowhere is this frontier spirit stronger than in the United States of America. It almost defines the character of the US. But the Earth is running out of frontiers fast. Star Trek was right -- there is only one final frontier, and that is space. In Brian Clegg's The Final Frontier we discover the massive challenges that face explorers, both human and robotic, to uncover the current and future technologies that...

Only twenty-four people have seen the whole earth. The most beautiful and influential photographs ever made were taken, almost as an afterthought, by the astronauts of the Apollo space program from the moon. The Earth Gazers is a book about the long road to the capture of the unforgettable images of Earth taken from space. It is a history of the space program and of the ways in which it transformed our view of the earth and changed the lives of the...