Space : A History of Space Exploration in Photographs

by Chaikin, Andrew L.

• ISBN13: 9781552979877
• ISBN10: 1552979873
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-31
• Publisher: Firefly Books Ltd

Summary

"The photographs in this book capture a vision of the Heavens and our Earth with a crystal clarity which we are lucky enough to see with our own eyes." - Tom Hanks"The immensity... the beauty... the challenge... the triumph and the tragedies... are captured in Andy Chaikin's elegant photo history." - Neil ArmstrongEvocative, dramatic and fascinating, Space is a brilliant collection of more than 300 images that pay tribute to and trace the history of space exploration.This book covers fifty years of this immense human endeavor that started in earnest during the Cold War: Early theories on space travel Pioneering flights by the Soviets NASA's earliest missions Apollo moon landings The space shuttle Space probes and space stations The future of space exploration.The images -- some very rare -- have been painstakingly researched from American, Russian and other space programs. As a result, this book is both a historical record of this astonishing era and a portfolio of the most stunning scenes ever photographed.

Author Biography

Andrew Chaikin served on the Viking Mars missions and was a researcher at the Smithsonian's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies. He is the author of A Man on the Moon, the basis for the Emmy Award-winning HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. He is a regular commentator on NPR's Morning Edition.

Captain James A. Lovell flew on the Gemini 7 and Gemini 12 missions, navigated Apollo 8 and commanded Apollo 13.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. 8
Author's Preface	p. 12
Introduction: Dreams of Space	p. 14
Leaving the Cradle	p. 24
The Race for the Moon	p. 46
Changing Horizons	p. 98
Space Shuttles and Space Stations	p. 166
Through Rugged Ways to the Stars	p. 198
The Twenty-First Century	p. 230
Acknowledgments and Index	p. 253
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction Dreams of Space We live in an age when space exploration is an everyday occurrence. Men and women are living and working in space for months at a time aboard an International Space Station that circles the Earth some 250 miles (400 kilometers) up. Space probes send back stunning images of distant worlds in our own solar system, while in Earth orbit the Hubble Space Telescope peers even farther out into space, probing the mysteries of the cosmos. At times it seems as if it has always been this way. The reality is quite different. It wasn't so long ago -- the mid-1950s -- that the very idea of sending humans into space seemed so fantastic that most people doubted it would happen in their lifetimes. No one could have guessed that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin would become the first human to orbit the Earth in 1961, or that American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin would leave mankind's first footprints on the Moon just eight years later. Even in retrospect, the advent of the space age is among the most extraordinary events in human history. But while its causes were largely unforeseen, it didn't happen by accident. Its origins lie not only in the insights of some of history's greatest scientists and the efforst of the twentieth-century's space pioneers, but in the geopolitics of the Cold War. Nobody knows when humans first dreamed of exploring the realms beyond Earth, but there are stores of space travel going back as far as the second century A.D., when Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist, described a sailing ship lifted from the ocean and carried to the Moon by a violent whirlwind. Some 1,400 years later, in 1649, the celebrated French philosopher and playwright Cyrano de Bergerac penned his own fanciful lunar journey in Voyage dans la Lune (Voyage to the Moon) followed by a sequel, Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires du Soleil (Comic History of States and Empires of the Sun). De Bergerac, while acquainted with the scientific theories of the day, let his imagination run wild. However, it was a Russian mathematics teacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who laid the groundwork for space travel. Largely self-educated, Tsiolkovsky had been profoundly deaf from childhood; in his brilliant writings and forecasts, written between 1892 and his death in 1935, he devised plans for multi-stage rockets, living and working in weightlessness and even spacewalking. As innovative as Tsiolkovsky's rocket designs were, they made use of a principle first stated in the seventeenth century by the English scientist Sir Isaac Newfon -- for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In a rocket, hot gases racing out of the engine nozzle (the "action") create a force that propels the rocket upward (the "reaction"). Although Tsiolkovsky never actually built a rocket himself, his ideas fuelled generations of space pioneers to come, His 1911 statement, now a mantra for advocates of space exploration, boldly stated humanity's imperative to leave its home planet: "The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle." By the time of Tsiolkovsky's death, the technology for making his visions come true was already developing. In the United States a solitary inventor named Robert Goddard was developing the world's first liquid-fuelled rockets, Goddard knew that a rocket that burned liquid propellants would produce far more energy than one powered by solid fuel (for example, the black gunpowder used in fireworks). In addition, liquid-fuelled rockets can be turned off and re-started; they can also be throttled (that is, the flow of fuel can be controlled) -- great advantages for a space vehicle. While Goddard's rockets were small, they were actually the direct ancestors of the mighty boosters that would one day send astronauts into space. However, no single person could solve the problems of large-scale rockets, and, ultimate