Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.' A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties and terrors about the extremity of what they were trying to achieve. Mailer is both admiring and appalled and the result is a book which is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant depiction of the now-forgotten technical issues and uncertainties around the mission. A Fire on the Moon is also a matchless portrait of an America caught in a morass of introspection and misery, torn apart by the war in Vietnam. But for one, extraordinary week in the summer of 1969 all eyes were on the fates of three men in a rocket, travelling a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. With an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

The race to the moon was won spectacularly by Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969. When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their 'giant step' across a ghostly lunar landscape, they were watched by some 600 million people on Earth 250,000 miles away. "A Man on the Moon" is the definitive account of the heroic Apollo from the tragedy of the fire in Apollo 1 during a simulated launch, through the euphoria of the first moonwalk, to the discoveries made by the first scientist in space aboard Apollo 17. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the astronauts and team, this is the story of the twentieth century's greatest human achievement, minute-by-minute, in the words of those who were there.

Designing a mission for a flight to the Moon requires balancing the demands of a wide array of spacecraft systems, with the details of tending each component generating complex and often contradictory requirements. More than any other system in the Apollo spacecraft, the Apollo Guidance Computer drove the capabilities of the lunar missions. In the 1960's, most computers filled an entire room yet the spacecraft's computer was required to be compact and require little power. When compared to modern systems, the AGC's design limitations and lack of speed presented formidable challenges. Yet, hardware and software engineers overcame these difficulties, and their creation was able to guide a new and complex spacecraft and its precious human cargo away from the safety of Earth and towards a new world. Although people today find it difficult to accept that it was possible to control a spacecraft using such a 'primitive' computer, it nevertheless had capabilities that are advanced even by today's standards.The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation is the first comprehensive description of the Apollo computer, beginning with its internal organization to its user interface and flight software. Particular emphasis is placed on the instruction set, Executive capabilities, the Interpreter and the detailed procedures for mission application software. Launch, landing on the Moon and entry back on Earth are explained in rich detail and show how the computer was an integral part of the spacecraft operation. As a comprehensive account, it spans the disciplines of computer science, aerospace engineering and spacecraft operations. The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation is an essential reference for space historians and engineers, and serves well as a complementary text for computer science courses.

The journey into space is a dangerous one, and although some aspects of space travel seem to be routine it still takes humanity to the limits of what is technically possible. It is an environment that forgives no mistake, and where carelessness usually has fatal consequences. This book records more than a dozen American and Soviet space disasters from 1967 to the present day. Presented are tragic and near tragic missions such as NASA’s Gemini 6A and 8, Apollo 1 and 13, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, as well as the Soviets’ Soyuz 1, 11, and 18-1, and more. The concise and detailed history is presented along with rare photographs, transcripts of mission conversations, as well as detailed timelines.

This concise history is the first book in a new series on the Soviet space program and features many rare photographs, diagrams, and charts. When Soviet rocket experts examined the first Nazi V-2s in early 1945, they immediately realized that their own technology was years behind what the Germans had developed. The dropping of the two American atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 made the path forward clear: the development of a Soviet atomic bomb, and a suitable missile to carry it. This story begins with the Soviet’s pre- and early war developments in rocket technology, then covers the discovery and study of the V-2s at Peenemünde, Germany. The Soviets assembled remaining V-2 rockets from existing parts and their mode of operation was studied. Developments in the Soviet R and G series missiles in the early 1950s are discussed in detail, as is the development for the peaceful use of Soviet rocket technology in space.