Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> History

To commemorate the momentous 50^th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin s pioneering journey into space on 12^th April 2011, a series of five books to be published annually until 2011 will explore this half century, decade by decade, to discover how humanity s knowledge of flying, working and living in space has changed. Each volume will focus not only upon the individual missions within its decade, but also upon the key challenges facing human space exploration at specific points within those 50 years: from the simple problems of breathing and eating in space to the challenges...

Go behind the scenes of NASA's most visible program

"NPR journalist Duggins reviews the 25-year saga of the shuttle missions, some of which have been shrouded in mystery, as astronauts took secret military payloads into space; others received worldwide attention and acclaim, as when the Hubble Space Telescope was restored to 20 20 vision. . . . A worthy addition to the recent torrent of books about the American space program."--Publishers Weekly

"A story of lost dreams, new hopes, and the ongoing conquest of...

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets...

Leadmining was an important industry in Britain from the time of the Romans until the late nineteenth century - its remains are to be found scattered in and under the hills of south-west England, Wales, the Mendips and the Pennines, and in the Lake District, Isle of Man and Scotland. From the thousands of early small mines, leadmining by the eighteenth century was forced to use capital-intensive methods to cope with deeper deposits and great inflows of water, including very long levels and steam engines. Lead smelters, too, had to adapt and they developed new furnaces. By the 1880s,...

Semiconductors and the Information Revolution sets out to explain the development of modern electronic systems and devices from the viewpoint of the semiconductor materials (germanium, silicon, gallium arsenide and many others) which made them possible. It covers the scientific understanding of these materials and its intimate relationship with their technology and many applications. It began with Michael Faraday, took off in a big way with the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 and is still burgeoning today. It is a story to match any artistic or engineering...

Metalworking Through History provides a comprehensive, historic overview of the subject of metalworking while exploring it within its cultural context. It is written from the perspective that the crafting of objects in metal is a unique way of understanding a particular time and culture. As a broad encyclopedia of metalworking, it allows the reader to view the different societies and periods that produced work in this medium as part of a global, interrelated practice. Comprised of over sixty entries on relevant time periods, cultures, makers and processes, the book is a much-needed general...

It was a time of bold new technology, historic moments, and international jousting on the final frontier. But it was also a time of human drama, of moments less public but no less dramatic in the lives of those who made the golden age of space flight happen. These are the moments and the lives that Into That Silent Sea captures, a book that tells the intimate stories of the men and women, American and Russian, who made the space race their own and gave the era its compelling character.

These pages chronicle a varied and riveting cavalcade of human stories,...