In October 1968 Donn Eisele flew with fellow astronauts Walt Cunningham and Wally Schirra into Earth orbit in Apollo 7. The first manned mission in the Apollo program and the first manned flight after a fire during a launch pad test killed three astronauts in early 1967, Apollo 7 helped restart NASA’s manned-spaceflight program.Known to many as a goofy, lighthearted prankster, Eisele worked his way from the U.S. Naval Academy to test pilot school and then into the...

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's courageous, candid memoir of his return to Earth after the historic moon landing and his personal struggle with fame and depression."We landed with all the grace of a freight elevator," Buzz Aldrin relates in the opening passages of Return to Earth, remembering Command Module Columbia's abrupt descent into the gravity of the blue planet. With that splash, Aldrin takes readers on a journey through the human side of ...

NASA astronaut Mike Mullane delivers a hilariously candid and often raw astronaut memoir of life in the Space Shuttle era. Selected in 1978 as part of the groundbreaking astronaut class—the first to include women—Mullane exposes the unfiltered reality behind the heroic veneer of NASA.His stories bounce between bawdy military-flyboy antics, interactions with feminist pioneers and post-doc scientists, and the unforgiving bureaucracy of NASA leadership. Mullane pulls ...

As command module pilot for the Apollo 15 mission to the moon in 1971, Al Worden flew on what is widely regarded as the greatest exploration mission that humans have ever attempted. He spent six days orbiting the moon, including three days completely alone, the most isolated human in existence. During the return from the moon to earth he also conducted the first spacewalk in deep space, becoming the first human ever to see both the entire earth and moon simply by turning his head. The Apol...

An "exciting" minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston ( The New York Times).On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in inco...

The untold story of the historic voyage to the moon that closed out one of our darkest years with a nearly unimaginable triumph.In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind’s first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race,...

Relaunching the adventures of the U.S.S. da Vinci, as Captain David Gold, Commander Sonya Gomez, and the rest of Starfleet's miracle workers solve the problems of the galaxy, one disaster at a time.Federation Station Deep Space 10 has been plagued by technical difficulties since its construction a year ago. On several occasions, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers team on the da Vinci has been sent to fix them, and now the problems have intensified.Fearing sabotage or worse, C...

Chief engineer Thomas J. Kelly gives a firsthand account of designing, building, testing, and flying the Apollo lunar module. It was, he writes, “an aerospace engineer’s dream job of the century.” Kelly’s account begins with the imaginative process of sketching solutions to a host of technical challenges with an emphasis on safety, reliability, and maintainability. He catalogs numerous test failures, including propulsion-system leaks, ascent-engine instability, stress corrosion of the alum...

1969: Captain John Christopher of the U.S. Air Force has just returned from a most peculiar mission to investigate a UFO sighting. But even though the mission took only a few minutes, the captain has vague memory flashes of futuristic humans, a pointy-eared alien named Spock, and a ship called The U.S.S. Enterprise....Government agent James Wainwright has waited for this fateful day ever since he encountered the conquering Ferengi Marauders Quark, Rom, and Nog in Roswell i...

-a Future Night Stalkers romance story-The nations of Earth are retreating into space. When the last airlift mission must succeed, the Night Stalkers answer the call.Captain Takara Olmsted and her Stinger-class ship, Stella, lead the way. But when Captain Rick Coralto and the Jess take a hit, the airlift goes to hell.The mission needs more than fantastic pilots to complete this Night Rescue.

"Barbree offers an intimate portrait of a man grateful to have spent his life doing what he loved. . . . includes many never-before-seen photos." — BooklistHere for the first time is the definitive story of Neil Armstrong's life of flight he shared for five decades with a trusted friend—Jay Barbree.Working from fifty years of conversations he had with Neil, from notes, interviews, NASA spaceflight transcripts, and remembrances of t...

There's more to Starfleet than exploring strange new worlds. When serious technical know-how is required, Starfleet sends in an S.C.E. team, such as the one stationed aboard the U.S.S. da Vinci. This topflight assemblage of engineers and technical specialists is a mixture of extraordinarily talented humans and exotic aliens, including P8 Blue, an insectlike alien who specializes in analyzing structural systems, and a single, unpaired Bynar, unique among his species. Under the comm...