Life in Space

1st Printing. Very Large Book. Pages apart from binding, Cover Fine Condition, Pages Near Fine Condition; It has been, and remains, humanity's greatest adventure-a bold leap into the velvet dark and piercing light beyond the earth's protective atmosphere, a daring break with the bonds of gravity that tie us to this planet, shape our very bodies and make us earthlings. The adventure has unfolded entirely in space shuttle all wrapped into a mere quarter century. And the high points serve as bench marks in both our private lives and our collective experience: There are few adults alive today who cannot recall where they were when Neil Armstrong took the first tentative step on the moon. Most were probably in front of a television set. But for millions around the world the original TV image was preserved by the more detailed pictures in Life. It was in Life that we saw the missions again, from blast-off to splashdown, and met not only the crews who flew them but also the scientists, engineers and technicians who built and controlled the spacecraft. We met the astronauts' families, saw the astronauts in training and at play as well as in space. And we read, in their own words, how the crew members felt about their incomparable job. Here now, in one volume, are the wonders of the space adventure relived. An evocative introduction by Loudon Wainwright, assistant managing editor of Life and one of the original staffers to cover the story for the magazine, sets the stage for the greatest pictures from Life's unparalleled coverage, combined with NASA photographs taken by the astronauts (or in some cases, the spacecraft)themselves. A lively, informative text by the Editors of Time-Life Books puts the photographs in dramatic perspective, with launch-by-launch mission portfolios and complete chapters that assess Projects Mercury (the first hops), Gemini (space rendezvous), Apollo (to the moon).and all that followed. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo: Each program built on work that had gone before, raising the scaffold of knowledge and experience that delivered Armstrong and company to the moon just eight years after the first man-Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin-went into space. In a way, the American journey began in the Soviet Union even before Gagarin, with Sputnik I, the tiny satellite whose launch in 1957 awed the whole world. The U.S. response to the shock of successive Soviet firsts was vintage Americana: a marvelous mixture of single-minded drive and dizzying hoopla, complete with ticker-tape parades for the national heroes who upheld American honor even as they were extending the reach of all humanity. Fast on Apollo came Skylab, the first real space station. Three separate crews set up orbital housekeeping, the last one for nearly three months, rocketing up and back in leftover Apollo spacecraft that docked with the mammoth space laboratory. Their work in the orbiting Skylab went beyond the exploration of space to begin its exploitation: The astronauts, some of them scientists, used their altitude to survey the earth's treasure and properties, the lack of atmosphere to study the sun and stars, and weightlessness to manufacture stronger and more uniform crystals and alloys. Then, in 1981, came the space shuttle, as daring an idea as landing on the moon had been a decade earlier. Admirers called it "the marvel," in homage to a craft that could not only take off as a rocket and orbit as a satellite but actually fly back to earth as gracefully as an airplane. The shuttle approaches something like mass transit in space-a fleet of orbiters (four are scheduled by 1985) carrying inexpensive "get-away specials" for private companies and citizens-and perhaps, at some future data, carrying the private citizens themselves. While astronauts aboard Skylab and the space shuttle seem almost to have mastered the inner reaches of space, the remarkable unmanned probes described in the last chapter have been sailing more distant cosmic seas. …