On February 1, 2003, the unthinkable happened. The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated 37 miles above Texas, seven brave astronauts were killed and America's space program, always an eyeblink from disaster, suffered its second catastrophic in-flight failure. Unlike the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier, Columbia's destruction left the nation one failure away from the potential abandonment of human space exploration. Media coverage in the immediate aftermath focused on ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

" Deke! gives essential insight into both Deke Slayton and the US space program, in Deke's own quiet and matter-of-fact voice." —Greg Bear, New York Times –bestselling authorDeke Slayton was one of the first seven Mercury astronauts—and he might have been the first American in space. Instead, he became the first chief of American Astronaut Corps. It was Deke Slayton who selected...

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 ...

A heart-wrenching true story of one young man's journey into, through, and out of the Holocaust.Some people have a knack for survival, for getting out of jams. Twelve-year-old David Karmi found himself face to face with the ultimate test. With his homeland consumed by fear, David entered a world of human slaughter. Whole towns were vaporized. Cities obliterated in firestorms. More than fifty million people died—twelve million either gassed, shot, hanged, worked to death or subjecte...

This New York Times bestselling memoir of a veteran NASA flight director tells riveting stories from the early days of the Mercury program through Apollo 11 (the moon landing) and Apollo 13, for both of which Kranz was flight director.Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America’s manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA’s Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He partic...

“A fascinating, and sometimes disturbing” examination of our relationship with artificial intelligence in the tradition of Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku (Martin Ford, New York Times–bestselling author of Rise of the Robots).Imagine a robotic stuffed animal that can respond to a child’s emotional state, a commercial that can change based on a customer’s facial expression, or even a company that can create feelings as though a person...

The inspiration for the iconic film, this memoir by the father of a prodigy reflects on chess, competition, and childhood.Fred Waitzkin fell in love with chess during the Cold War–era showdown between Russian champion Boris Spassky and young American superstar Bobby Fischer. Twelve years later, Waitzkin's own son, Joshua, discovered chess in Washington Square Park and began displaying the telltale signs of a prodigy. Soon, crowds gathered to watch the six-year-old, ...

The Newbery Medal–winning author of A Wrinkle in Time paints an intimate portrait of her forty-year marriage to actor Hugh Franklin in this personal memoir.A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship.As National Book Award-winnin author Madeleine L'Engle describes a relationship characterized by compassion, respect, and growth, as well as challenge and confl...