Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA

Teitel, an expert in the history of spaceflight and the host of the YouTube channel Vintage Space, illuminates the foundations of American spaceflight with this exceptional and detailed “prehistory” of the field. Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon inspired a generation of rocket engineers and scientists in the early 20th century. Searching for more power than gunpowder could provide, Romanian-born physicist Hermann Oberth designed the earliest liquid-fueled rockets, and his 1923 book, The Rocket into Planetary Space, spurred the formation of Germany’s Society for Space Travel, a home for kindred space-gazing engineers and scientists. One of those was rocketry pioneer Wernher von Braun, whose work on the Nazis’ V-2 rocket program that (with some fast talking) eventually earned him and his team postwar jobs working at America’s new White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Teitel takes readers through the nitty-gritty of government-program goals, advances in design and technology, and a host of animal flights, charting the ever-winding path to the 1958 creation of NASA amid America’s political and scientific focus on manned spaceflight. Even for readers already familiar with NASA’s story, Teitel’s history is fascinating new territory, filled with a galaxy of lively characters who share a stubborn determination to reach orbit. [em](Jan.) [/em]