The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

It is astonishing to think that there are people alive
today from the time when man first flew in an enginepowered,
heavier-than-air plane. In the past century, we
have learned not only to fly, but to fly to the Moon, to
Mars, and to the very outskirts of the Solar System. Look
up at the right time and place on a clear night and you
can see the International Space Station glide across the
sky and know that not all of us are now confined to
Earth: always there are a handful of us on the near edge
of this new and final frontier of space.
Our first steps beyond our home planet have been hesitant
and hazardous. There are some who say, “Why
bother?” Why expend effort and money, and risk lives,
when there are so many problems to be resolved back on
this world? In the end, the answer is simple. We can point
to the enormous value of Earth resources satellites in
monitoring the environment, or to the benefits of spacecraft
that help us communicate among continents or predict
the weather or gaze with clear sight across the
Introduction
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light-years. We can extol the virtues of mining the Moon
or the asteroid belt, or learning about our origins in
cometary dust, or the things that can be made or gleaned
from a laboratory in zero-g. But these reasons are not at
the core of why we go—why we must go—on a voyage that
will ultimately take us to the stars. Our reason for spaceflight
is just this: we are human, and to be human is to be
inquisitive. At heart, we are explorers with a universe of
billions of new worlds before us.
This book is intended as a companion to the human
journey into space. Of course, it has many facts and figures—and
acronyms!—as all books on this subject do. But
beyond the technical details of rockets and orbits, it tries
to capture something of the drama of the quest, the
human thread—in a word, the culture of space exploration.
I hope that many readers will use it to wander
from reference to reference and so create their own
unique paths through this most unique of adventures.
Enjoy the ride!