Astronauts Books - Page 2

Flight My Life in Mission Control

Christopher Kraft, Chris Kraft

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In his New York Times bestseller, Chris Kraft delivers an unforgettable account of his life in Mission Control. The first NASA flight director, Kraft emerged from boyhood in small-town America to become a visionary who played an integral role in what would become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's all here, from the legendary Mercury missions that first sent Americans into space through the Gemini and Apollo missions that landed them on the moon. The great heroes of space are here, too-Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin-leading the space race that would change the course of U.S. history.

From NASA's infancy to its greatest triumphs . . . from the calculated gambles to the near disasters to the pure luck that accompanied each mission, Flight relives the spellbinding events that captured the imagination of the world. It is a stirring tribute to the U.S. space program and to the men who risked their lives to take America on a flight into the unknown-from the man who was there for it all.

"A highly readable memoir." (The New York Times Book Review)

"A rewarding look at the brief, shining moment when space pathfinders held sway over space warriors." (The Washington Post)

The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds

Edgar, Dr. Mitchell, Dwight Arnan Williams

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In February 1971, as Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell hurtled earthward through space, he was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. He intuitively sensed that his presence and that of the planet in the window were all part of a deliberate, universal process and that the glittering cosmos itself was in some way conscious. The experience was so overwhelming Mitchell knew his life would never be the same.

For the next 35 years he embarked on another journey, an inward exploration of the ineffable mystery of human consciousness and being. Mitchell left NASA to form the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The Institute allowed him to initiate research in areas of study previously neglected by mainstream science and where he constructed a theory that could not only explain the mysteries consciousness, but the psychic event--what spiritualists call a "miracle," and scientists dismiss altogether.

Mitchell also created a new dyadic model of reality, revealing a self-aware universe not predetermined by the laws of physics, nor preordained by deities, nor infinitely malleable. While human actions are generally subject to the laws of physics, these laws are also influenced by the mind.

The Way of the Explorertraces two remarkable journeys--one through space and one through the mind. Together they fundamentally alter how we understand the miracle and mystery of being, and ultimately reveal mankind's role in its own destiny.

Rocketman: Astronaut Pete Conrad's Incredible Ride to the Moon and Beyond

Nancy Conrad, Howard A. Klausner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great guy, deserves a better book 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I've read way too many space books, so I love the subject matter, but the style of this one was too breezy, lacking in important detail. Each chapter is about 12 words long, so you get the impression this was either rushed through or intended for young adults. I learned little about the man, whom I wholly admire. Did he alienate anybody? Were there any character flaws? Also, I was looking to learn more of an insider's view of Gemini and Apollo, but it was all very superficial, heard-it-before material. I'd read a bit about Conrad, like his attempt to smuggle onto the moon a huge cowboy hat to fit over his space helmet, or his attempt at trick photography on the lunar surface, hoping to befuddle the photo analysts later. Neither of these gems were in the book. He's a great guy, a pilot's pilot, a problem-solving magician with a live-for-the-moment spirit. But the book is really junk food, even for a space nut like myself. Sorry, Pete. They done ya wrong.

Editorial Review:

Whether he was hot-dogging at Mach 2, test-flying every supersonic jet the Navy developed (and some they shouldn't have), orbiting the Earth at almost 20,000 mph, or redlining his Corvette, Pete Conrad loved pushing the envelope.

The guy every NASA pilot wanted to happyhour with after work-and would kill to fly with-Pete had a natural outspokenness that got him removed from the Mercury program. But the "Comeback Kid" came roaring back-flying two Gemini missions, walking on the Moon as the commander of Apollo 12, commanding the first Skylab, and logging more time in space than all the original astronauts combined.

This is a surprisingly candid insider's view of the greatest ride in history: America's glorious race to the stars, as seen through the eyes of a real space cowboy.

High Calling

Evelyn Husband

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Pretty good book 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The book High Calling is good. I recommend that if you enjoy real life novels you buy this book. It is about the astronaut Rick Husband and his wife Evelyn Husband. I liked it for that reason. Also, it gets to the point without too much detail but it has enough. It was also interesting how it told about all of the procedures that astronauts do and how their lives are. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes books about real people in real situations. Another good thing is that the book is spiritual and tells people who read it to become more spiritual.

Editorial Review:

Rick Husband wanted to be an astronaut since his fourth birthday, but it wasn't always for the right reasons. Initially, he thought it would be neat . . . cool . . . a fun thing to do. It wasn't until he came to a spiritual crossroads and was able to give that dream up to discover the true desires of his heart before he actually got into the space shuttle program at NASA. Three failed attempts didn't daunt this driven pilot-and the fourth interview process, though lengthy and difficult, proved successful for him.

Husband's years at NASA served not only to develop his integrity and character, but also to increase his faith in a Creator that could not be denied in the vastness of space. His story is not only inspirational but exhilarating and invigorating, as readers will witness the life of a man who consistently pursued the desires of his heart even as he served a faithful God.

Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard

Neal Thompson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

intriguing bio of a Great American 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I found this bio to be well written, and informative on not only Shepard, but also the Mercury Seven and the beginnings of NASA. It charts the mans abilities, and also his shortcomings, and well evokes the period of the space race. I thoroughly enjoyed it, highly recommend it and recommend the From Earth to the Moon miniseries as a good companion piece.

The paperback is much better. 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The hardback version of this book was an extremely entertaining read, but was unfortunately marred by many basic factual errors. It is good to see that the author took the time to fix the major ones for this paperback edition - it is a much better read for it.

Editorial Review:

Alan Shepard was the brashest, cockiest, and most flamboyant of America’s original Mercury Seven, but he was also regarded as the best. Intense, colorful, and dramatic, he was among the most private of America’s public figures and, until his death in 1998, he guarded the story of his life zealously.

Light This Candle, based on Neal Thompson’s exclusive access to private papers and interviews with Shepard’s family and closest friends—including John Glenn, Wally Schirra, and Gordon Cooper—offers a riveting, action-packed account of Shepard’s life.

John Glenn: A Memoir

John Glenn

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Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

He was the first astronaut to orbit the Earth. Nearly four decades later, as the world's oldest astronaut, his courage reveted a nation. But these two historical events only bracketed a life that covers the sweep of an extraordinary century.

John Glenn's autobiography spans the seminal events of the twentieth century. It is a story that begins with his childhood in Ohio where he learned the importance of family, community, and patriotism. He took these values with him as a marine fighter pilot during World War II and into the skies over Korea, for which he would be decorated. Always a gifted flier, it was during the war that he contemplated the unlimited possibilities of aviation and its frontiers.

We see the early days of NASA, where he first served as a backup pilot for astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. In 1962 Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first manned orbital mission of the United States. Then came several years in international business, followed by a twenty-four year career as a U.S. Senator-and in 1998 a return to space for his remarkable Discover mission at the age of seventy-seven.

Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown

Gordon Cooper, Bruce Henderson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Al Shepard as Darth Vader? Naaaah. 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

This work has produced a rather hefty array of responses from Amazon readers, many of whom are stridently opposed to Cooper's career-long pursuit of the secrets of UFO's and other mysterious new technologies, and others who see in the Mercury astronaut a hero of what now appears to be a cause losing steam. Our focus here is on the book, however. For as several reviewers have correctly observed, this is a tale of two Gordo's, one battling the unknowns of space, and the other battling the knowns of the NASA/military industrial complex.

Unfortunately, neither tale is particularly compelling. The account of the astronaut's career, coming as it did in 2000, was the tail of the dog in a string of early astronaut autobiographies as the pioneers rushed to beat the Grim Reaper with their version of events. As to the second, Cooper's extensive research and observations about UFO's are not as deliciously crazy as some would like us to believe, either. In fact, some of his conjectures about alien propulsion systems and the like are rather fascinating to the layman.

While Cooper has been a busy man since leaving NASA thirty-something years ago, it would seem that something he neglected to do is read what others around the space program were writing in those three decades, and specifically what they were writing about him. One Amazon reader in this sequence of reviews reports to having collected 150 such volumes himself. The general consensus of post-Apollo writers seems to be that Cooper's years with NASA are somewhat enigmatic. One of the original seven Mercury astronauts, he was the last one to fly, a statement of sorts about how the NASA hierarchy regarded him. [Oddly, NASA's "the best shall be first" policy in Mercury resulted in Cooper's complex and spectacularly successful Faith 7 two-day marathon, the last flight in the Mercury series.]

Cooper and Pete Conrad would fly the Gemini 5 mission in the summer of 1965 to test fuel cells, endurance and, as the author observes wryly, defecation technique. But after Gemini 5, Cooper becomes an invisible man. He was designated to the back-up crews of three future flights, the last of which, Apollo 13, he turned down as a political slight.

So why did the hero of Faith 7 fall out of favor in succeeding years? This is the question most readers today would probably bring to the book. The author himself never does soul-searching about his own role in why his space career stalled. Instead he boils his dilemma down to two words: Al Shepard. Cooper believes that Shepard, embittered by his health problems and eager to get back into rotation, used his influence with Deke Slayton, then assigning crews, to keep the Mercury hero under the radar. Cooper's distrust of Shepard appears to date back to his Faith 7 days in 1963 when he asked Wally Schirra to privately tail Shepard, then Cooper's back-up, during pre-flight training.

Cooper cites the Shepard/Slayton cabal as symptomatic of the increasing bureaucracy of NASA, the military, and the federal government. He notes, for example, his complaint in a conversation with President Lyndon Johnson that his photography from Gemini 5 had been seized and classified. Johnson coolly informed him that he, the president, had given the order. It is important for the reader to observe keenly Cooper's misadventures with government entities, for they are of one weave with his later criticisms of government cover-up in the reporting of UFO sightings and general hostility toward individuals like himself at the outer margins of technology, from this world or another.

If Cooper feels that he was blackballed by Shepard and Slayton, what can we say of astronauts Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, Gene Cernan, and Pete Conrad, to name several whose careers thrived under the Slaton-Shepard regime? Lovell, in fact, flew four space missions [two Gemini, two Apollo] after Cooper's Gemini 5, and he is living proof that the "evil duo" was not completely adverse to the emergence of "stars" in the astronaut corps.

No, the answer to Cooper's dilemma is more personal, and probably reflects nagging doubts in NASA about Cooper's manageability and application to the growing complexity of the space business. In this Cooper was hardly alone. Nearly all of the original Mercury Seven had difficulty adjusting to a bigger astronaut corps, greater bureaucracy, public relations, politics, and the general idea of "teamwork." It is no accident that Schirra and Shepard, the two Mercury veterans to fly Apollo, each chose all rookie teams. [Walt Cunningham of Apollo 7 would refer to Schirra as "the cock of the walk."] Schirra himself found the new NASA so discomfiting that he passed on a sure moon landing assignment and retired.

Because Cooper does not really address his own career difficulties with insight, the charges of some historians that Cooper did not train or apply himself sufficiently will still be left to hang out there in the foreseeable future. This is regrettable, because Cooper, like his colleague Scotty Carpenter, was one of the true multidimensional human beings of the early space program. And I give him a great deal of credit for his respect of John Glenn and others for whom timing and luck made them national heroes.

Given Cooper's colorful space career, his subsequent employment by Disney, among others, comes as little surprise. The intrepid pilot of Faith 7 became--how can I put it?--a magnet for scientific entrepreneurs, some of remarkable brilliance, some eccentrics, and some undecipherable. Cooper apparently never lost touch with his astronaut friends, but he certainly picked up new ones along the way, including the mysterious clairvoyant and purveyor of character Valerie Ransone who seems to have preoccupied his personal and scientific attentions for a period in the 1980's. Perhaps if he had met Valerie in 1965, it would be Gordon Cooper making that giant leap for mankind.

Editorial Review:

One of the original Mercury 7 astronauts -- a select group of the nation's top military test pilots chosen for America's newly formed manned space exploration program -- Gordon Cooper made history. Now, in this compelling, down-to-earth memoir, he recalls his adventurous life pushing the envelope in the cockpits of planes and spacecraft alike. He also looks toward the next millennium of space travel, offering deeply held views on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- including the distinct possibility that we have already made contact.

Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race

David Scott, Alexei Leonov

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Growing up on either side of the Iron Curtain, David Scott and Alexei Leonov experienced very different childhoods but shared the same dream to fly. Excelling in every area of mental and physical agility, Scott and Leonov became elite fighter pilots and were chosen by their countries' burgeoning space programs to take part in the greatest technological race ever-to land a man on the moon. In this unique dual autobiography, astronaut Scott and cosmonaut Leonov recount their exceptional lives and careers spent on the cutting edge of science and space exploration. With each mission fraught with perilous risks, and each space program touched by tragedy, these parallel tales of adventure and heroism read like a modern-day thriller. Cutting fast between their differing recollections, this book reveals, in a very personal way, the drama of one of the most ambitious contests ever embarked on by man, set against the conflict that once held the world in suspense: the clash between Russian communism and Western democracy.Before training to be the USSR's first man on the moon, Leonov became the first man to walk in space. It was a feat that won him a place in history but almost cost him his life. A year later, in 1966, Gemini 8, with David Scott and Neil Armstrong aboard, tumbled out of control across space. Surviving against dramatic odds-a split-second decision by pilot Armstrong saved their lives-they both went on to fly their own lunar missions: Armstrong to command Apollo 11 and become the first man to walk on the moon, and Scott to perform an EVA during the Apollo 9 mission and command the most complex expedition in the history of exploration, Apollo 15. Spending three days on the moon, Scott became the seventh man to walk on its breathtaking surface. Marking a new age of USA/USSR cooperation, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project brought Scott and Leonov together, finally ending the Cold War silence and building a friendship that would last for decades. Their courage, passion for exploration, and determination to push themselves to the limit emerge in these memoirs not only through their triumphs but also through their perseverance in times of extraordinary difficulty and danger.

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

Andrew Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A GREAT book about the Apollo program 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This particular book does a great job of getting into the insights of the astronauts when they were front page news. Apollo was truly the pinnacle of NASA and Andrew Smith does a great job of creating the aura that still surrounds the 9 men still living, that walked on another world.

I could've done without some of his personal musings, as he paints a picture that you would rather he keep to himself. I have my own personal perspectives and if you didn't grow up in U.K. or CA, you'll probably agree that Andrew should've kept some of his memories out of the pages.

Even with the author's anecdotes, the book is 5 stars and worthy reading for any space history buff.

Editorial Review:

The Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s have been called the last optimistic acts of the twentieth century. Twelve astronauts made this greatest of all journeys and were indelibly marked by it, for better or for worse. Journalist Andrew Smith tracks down the nine surviving members of this elite group to find their answers to the question "Where do you go after you've been to the Moon?"

A thrilling blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Moondust rekindles the hopeful excitement of an incandescent hour in America's past and captures the bittersweet heroism of those who risked everything to hurl themselves out of the known world -- and who were never again quite able to accept its familiar bounds.