The race to space between the United States and the Soviet Union captured the popular imagination. On April 12, 1961, the USSR launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on a one-orbit flight, making him the first human in space. Three weeks later, American astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. flew 116 miles above Earth before splashing down in the Bahamas. Over the next twenty years astronauts emerged as national heroes.

This book tells the story of the people and events of Projects Mercury and Gemini with hundreds of unpublished and rare photographs both color and black-and-white. Unlike other...

In this companion volume to John Bisney and J. L. Pickering s extraordinary book of rare photographs from the Mercury and Gemini missions, the authors now present the rest of the Golden Age of US manned space flight with a photographic history of Project Apollo.

Beginning in 1967, Moonshots and Snapshots of Project Apollo chronicles the program s twelve missions and its two follow-ons, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The authors draw from rarely seen NASA, industry, and news media images, taking readers to the Moon, on months-long odysseys above Earth, and finally on the first...