Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age
by Eric Berger · 23 Sep 2024 · 375pp · 113,230 words
touched down. Just months after the flight, before the end of 2011, Ferguson left NASA to direct the “crew and mission” systems for Boeing’s crew spaceflight program. Hurley believed Ferguson had plotted his exit from NASA to Boeing even before the shuttle flight. As part of this, Ferguson had carefully staged
Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle · 2 Jan 2019 · 352pp · 87,930 words
of Russian (and previously Soviet) space programs. Shenzhou and Tiangong: Respectively, the collective names for China’s new space capsules and space stations to provide crewed spaceflight capability. SLS: Space Launch System, a large rocket being built by NASA primarily for missions beyond low Earth orbit. It is derived from technology designed
Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program
by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas and Don Thomas · 1 Feb 2019 · 609pp · 159,043 words
knew that he had every intention at some point of trying to get on board the space shuttle.” Hans Mark became a champion of human-crewed spaceflight when he met and worked with the legendary Wernher von Braun in the 1970s, eventually coming to support the inclusion of ordinary people flying on
Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992
by Rick Houston and J. Milt Heflin · 27 Sep 2015 · 472pp · 141,591 words
into being. Even then, the location of a permanent MOCR remained in doubt. Would it stay at the Cape, closest to where the country’s crewed spaceflight missions would begin? Surely, that would be the best bet. Goddard, maybe? That was where NASA’s earliest computers were located, plus it was a
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docking, but that was a test that very nearly led to NASA’s first in-flight tragedy. The nastiest emergency in the young history of crewed spaceflight began innocently enough on 16 March 1966, when Gemini 8’s Neil Armstrong brought his spacecraft in for a smooth docking with an Agena Target
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other fields, but not in ours.” Third-floor comm loops fell silent, its console monitors darkened. It would be nearly a full decade before another crewed spaceflight was flown out of that room, as control for all three Skylab missions, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and the first four Space Shuttle missions
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since the loss of Challenger, and while no one could possibly have known it at the time, an eerie link to NASA’s second fatal crewed spaceflight was about to take place. As early as twenty-seven seconds into the flight, commander Hoot Gibson was noticing that he could see some sort
The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees · 18 Apr 2022 · 192pp · 63,813 words
. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s vision of sending humans to the moon was eagerly adopted by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who had become an early advocate of crewed spaceflight and had played a key role in the 1958 creation of NASA. Johnson’s policies ensured that NASA’s Texas center would provide the hub
Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle · 3 May 2021 · 342pp · 101,370 words
, no automation. The fate of the ship was in Stucky’s hands. Nichols was sure they were going to die: that was the hazard of crewed spaceflight. “If you want to build confidence in space, don’t try sending people there,” David Cowan, a venture capitalist who has invested in several commercial
The Last Astronaut
by David Wellington · 22 Jul 2019 · 460pp · 130,621 words
this up? “It’s my turn to correct you. I’m not quite so old as you may think. By my time we called it ‘crewed spaceflight.’ Not ‘manned.’” “Right,” Stevens said, closing his eyes in shame. “Right.” “At any rate, I believe I’m the person you wanted to talk to
The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski · 5 Mar 2019 · 202pp · 62,901 words
things that are beneficial overlaps only in part with the set of things that are profitable. New classes of antibiotic, rural high-speed internet, and crewed spaceflight would all be as difficult to deliver under a socialist market as under a capitalist one, without significant, planned intervention into the market. Meanwhile, items