Space Age

The magnificently illustrated companion volume to the six-part PBS television series from the creators of Cosmos and Planet Earth. Space Age is a great human story, full of intrigue and global rivalries, secrecy, surprises, heroes and heroines, brilliance and bravado, huge risk and profound failure, and an increasing awareness of who we are and where we fit in the universe. Full-color photos and illustrations.

A NASA insider highlights the current and historic roles of private enterprise in humanity s pursuit of spaceflight"

From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review) Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.

In summer 1969, astronauts landed on the moon and hippie hordes descended on Woodstock—two era-defining events that are not entirely coincidental. Neil M. Maher shows how NASA’s celestial aspirations were tethered to terrestrial concerns of the time: the civil rights struggle, the antiwar movement, environmentalism, feminism, and the culture wars.

This volume identifies and evaluates the relationship between outer-space geography and geographic position (astrogeography), and the evolution of current and future military space strategy. In doing so, it explores five primary propositions.

The inherent contradictions of the Space Age -- the mixture of technologies high and low, of nostalgia and progress, of pathos and promise -- are revealed in Kosmos, Adam Bartos's astonishing photographic survey of the Soviet space program. Bartos's fascination with this subject led him to seek out places like the bedroom where Yuri Gagarian slept the night before his history-making flight into space, located in the Baiknour Cosmodrome, the one-time top-secret space complex in the Kazakh desert. Kosmos presents 94 of Bartos's photographs, rich with the incongruities of the history, science, culture, and politics of the Space Age.

Foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke. Space exploration began with model and toy rockets. History shows that the greatest Rocketeers began their careers flying model rockets. Now in this book the story of the space race is told in dazzling colour. From the birth of models to the present day the toy rockets have often inspired the real rockets of the future. In fact model manufacturers like Revell and Aurora were frequently in trouble with the defence department for revealing military secrets! This is the Story of the Space Age, and uses the models to illustrate the way history twisted and turned to put us where we are today -- and maybe how space travel will develop in the future.

This book examines the drivers behind great power security competition in space to determine whether realistic strategic alternatives exist to further militarization. Space is an area of increasing economic and military competition. This book offers an analysis of actions and events indicative of a growing security dilemma in space, which is generating an intensifying arms race between the US, China, and Russia. It explores the dynamics behind a potential future war in space and investigates methods of preventing an arms race from an international relations theory and military-strategy standpoint. The book is divided into three parts: the first section offers a broad discussion of the applicability of international relations theory to current conditions in space; the second is a direct application of theory to the space environment to determine whether competition or cooperation is the optimal strategic choice; the third section focuses on testing the hypotheses against reality, by analyzing novel alternatives to three major categories of space systems. The volume concludes with a study of the practical limitations of applying a strategy centered on commercialization as a method of defusing the orbital security dilemma. This book will be of interest to students of space power, strategic studies, and international relations.