"Here is the little-known history of Otto Lilienthal, a daring man whose more than 2,000 successful flights inspired the Wright Brothers and other aviation pioneers. In 1862, balloons were the only way to reach the sky. But 14-year-old Otto Lilienthal didn't want to fly in balloons. He wanted to soar like a bird. Scientists, teachers, and news reporters everywhere said flying was impossible. Otto and his brother Gustav desperately wanted to prove...

"The story behind the historic race to the moon, from the perspective of the Americans who lived it--the astronauts and their families, the controllers and engineers, the technicians and politicians who made the impossible possible"--

In 1978, Sally Ride, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, responded to a newspaper ad to join the U.S. astronaut program. She was accepted and, in 1983, became the first American woman astronaut to fly in space. Illustrations.

"Mars is one of our closest neighbors, and a NASA robot named Curiosity is in charge of exploring the surface. Take a journey across a new planet along with Curiosity." -- back cover.

Examines the lives of the Wright brothers and discusses their experiments and triumphs in the field of flight.

Presents a history of the most famous secret military installation in the world, assembled from interviews with the people who served there and formerly classified information.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy's inspiring challenge, and America's race to the moon. On May 25, 1961, JFK made an astonishing announcement: his goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In this engrossing, fast-paced epic, Douglas Brinkley returns to the...

"When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots--a group then made up exclusively of men--had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender....

Christmas Eve, 1957: An RAF pilot needs a miracle to make it home as his fighter jet begins to fail, in a story by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author.
  It is Christmas Eve, 1957, and there are cozier places to be than the cockpit of a de Havilland Vampire fighter plane. But for the Royal Air Force pilot who has just taken off from West Germany, this single-seat jet is the only way to make it back to England for...

The only thing Rosalind Ling Geraghty loves more than watching NASA launches with her dad is building rockets with him. When he dies unexpectedly, all Ro has left of him is an unfinished model rocket they had been working on together. Benjamin Burns doesn't like science, but he can't get enough of Spacebound, a popular comic book series. When he finds a sketch that suggests that his dad created the comics, he's thrilled. Too bad his dad walked out...