Fly Me to the Moon: Lost in Space with the Mercury Generation

While this enthusiast's wide-eyed scrapbook may not sweep away readers unattuned to the thrill and romance of space exploration, space buffs will be mesmerized. Ethier, a freelance journalist born in 1958, calls himself a member of ""the Mercury Generation,"" an allusion to NASA's very first project (1958-1964) to launch a human into space. His breezy, informal, entertaining history of America's space program and of our Cold War race with the Soviets to own the heavens focuses on Project Mercury (Mercury astronaut Schirra, who orbited the earth in Sigma 7 in 1962 and went on to transmit the first live pictures from a manned spacecraft in 1968, contributes a foreword), yet the unabashedly nostalgic narrative also catapults from Projects Gemini and Apollo to John Glenn's historic 1998 return to space aboard the Space Shuttle. For Ethier--who cried tears of joy with college chums near Cape Canaveral when they watched the 1981 maiden launch of Space Shuttle Columbia--space flight is a metaphor for life, proof that with perseverance, study and faith one can accomplish anything. This theme resonates throughout profiles and interviews with NASA astronauts, engineers, technicians and amateur rocketeers. Ethier's odyssey is spiked with offbeat digressions, including his wife giving birth to their son (an event he likens to a rocket launch) and the story of rock singer/songwriter Jeannie Cunningham, whose veneration of her role model, astronaut Judy Resnik (a victim of the 1986 Challenger explosion) reportedly helped her kick her cocaine habit. (June)