Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Aeronautics & Astronautics

Aerospace journalist Joe Pappalardo has witnessed space rocket launches around the world, from the jungle of French Guiana to the coastline of California. In his comprehensive work Spaceport Earth, Pappalardo describes the rise of private companies in the United States and how they are reshaping the way the world is using space for industry and science. Spaceport Earth is a travelogue through modern space history as it is being made.

In the gripping Never Panic Early, Fred Haise, Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 13, offers a detailed firsthand account of when disaster struck three days into his mission to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded, a crewmate uttered the now iconic words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and the world anxiously watched as one of history’s most incredible rescue missions unfolded. Haise brings listeners into the heart of his experience on the challenging mission—considered NASA’s finest hour—and reflects on his life and career as an Apollo astronaut.

The inside look at how the battle of the space billionaires began and why it matters, Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver’s firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries outmaneuvered the system of political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency. The success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and countless other commercial space efforts were preceded by decades of work by a group of people Garver calls “space pirates.”

On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into a new spacecraft perched atop a large Saturn rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a routine dress rehearsal of their upcoming launch into orbit, then less than a month away. All three astronauts were experienced pilots, but little did they know, nor did anyone else, that once they entered the spacecraft that cold winter day they would never leave it alive. Apollo 1 is a candid portrayal of the astronauts, the disaster that killed them, and its aftermath.

Our nearest planetary neighbor has been the subject of endless fascination and wide-ranging theories throughout history. Is there life on Mars? Was there ever life on Mars? What was the atmosphere like thousands or millions of years ago? From Percival Lowell, who built his own observatory so he could dedicate himself to studying the red planet, to NASA landing the car-sized Curiosity rover in 2012, this book traces Scientific American's coverage of the observation and exploration of Mars.

This audiobook is about the American moon landings - and about the doubts expressed ever since concerning the reality of these landings. Were the images of men on the moon really just a huge and cleverly executed hoax? Eversberg explains the best-known claims and conspiracy theories

If humans and their private wealth have made such a mess of Earth, who can say we won’t do the same in space? In The Consequential Frontier, business and technology journalist Peter Ward is raising this vital question before it’s too late. Interviewing tech CEOs, inventors, scientists, lobbyists, politicians, and future civilian astronauts, Ward sheds light on a whole industry beyond headline-grabbing rocket billionaires like Bezos and Musk and introduces the new generation of activists trying to keep it from rushing recklessly into the cosmos.

July 20, 1969. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin left humanity’s first footprints on the Moon. The plaque they left behind reads, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” But was the Apollo 11 moon landing mission really a global endeavor? How did people outside the United States view these “rocket men”? Against the political backdrop of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, was it, indeed, “For all mankind”?

In the aftermath of an asteroid impact, Earth’s power grid is damaged nearly beyond recovery. The survival of our world may well depend on energy sources collected from an abandoned undersea settlement beneath the icy surface of Enceladus. Earth-raised Colonel Carter Rhodes, in charge of Earth’s recovery efforts, calls upon Gwen Baré, a Venusian engineer, to regain control of the deserted moon outpost and collect fuel for Earth’s collapsing power grids.