America in Space: NASA's First Fifty Years
Steven Dick, Robert Jacobs, Bertram Ulrich, , et al., foreword by Neil Armstrong; published in collaboration with NASA. . Abrams, $50 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-9373-0
The most memorable photographs from America's recent explorations of space have been taken by the Hubble space telescope and the Huygens mission to Saturn. But as the editors of this lavishly illustrated coffee-table volume demonstrate, in the early years of the space program, the camera's blinking eye captured human beings. Dick, NASA's chief historian, and his NASA colleagues offer images of the crew-cut young hot rods of the Mercury and Gemini programs before they became household names, along with a young test pilot named Neil Armstrong in 1956 operating a simulator of the X-15 hypersonic aircraft. Photographs capture the grandeur of the mammoth Saturn rockets blasting off, as well as the tragedy of the fire-charred
Reviewed on: 09/17/2007
Genre: Nonfiction