Michael Breggar, the award-winning author of "Auto-Magic" (seen monthly in The Linking Ring) is back with another collection of amazing, fun and well-constructed magical pieces. As in his previous best-selling book the "Five Roads to Vegas," some the effects have been previously published, but they have been further refined with more detailed explanations and performance notes. True to the "Auto-Magic" mantra, the routines in this book are professional and practical yet none require sleight of hand. As Michael always stresses, since the performance is the effect, the tricks need to be clever, layered, deceptive and, most of all, entertaining.Michael helps you navigate through each routine with careful descriptions and well-honed patter. However, you can easily adapt each effect to your own style.Contents:Back To The Launching Pad - Michael's addition the "Out of this World" landscape, with a big difference...it's done with the cards face up! Already a favorite of several working pros.ACAAN Opener - An old principle on top of an old U. F. Grant card trick turns it into a funny, yet still amazing Any Card at An Number effect.A Whole Empty Brain - Yet another old card principle that has been redressed and relayered to surprise even the knowledgeable. Two spectators show they are in mental sync by a very fair selection of cards from a shuffled deck. Not only are their cards mates, the rest of the deck suddenly turns blank!Not Just Another Book Test (A.K.A. "The Two-Fingered Book Test") - Michael received an amazing amount of emails on this effect. Finally, a book test that seems organic and makes contextual sense. Or were the emails more about the "AKA" part of the title??!The Dating Game - Playing around with yet another old principle, Michael conjures up a fun effect where famous couples' names are listed on index cards. The cards are then torn in half and fully mixed, thus "separating" the couples. Using random throws of dice, the spectators magically reunite the couples. Usually!Mixed Emojis - based on a Dan Harlan version of a Martin Gardner concept, a fabulous three-phase routine is demonstrated using domino-sized tiles depicting mobile phones with everyone' favorite excuse for not typing complete text messages!Cra-Ker-Jack - Michael invents a ridiculously bizarre and funny new casino game, with rules that change on a whim. The spectators are treated to an amazing routine of card magic where their random decisions find the mates to four selected cards and ultimately produce the four aces.The Price Is Write - From Michael's corporate repertoire, in figuring the "best price" for a silly-looking pen, the spectators write out all different prices on price tags. Through a very fair and random process of elimination, one tag is selected. The price on the tag exactly matches the amount of change in a small envelope, sitting on the table untouched from the beginning.Drawn Conclusion - Michael's favorite trick and frequent closer. From a shuffled deck, a spectator selects a face down card. They place their fingers lightly on top in an effort to read the card through their fingertips. The magician then tries to read the reading and draws the image on a paper. Is it the correct card? Well, sorta.Plus, two essays written in Michael's breezy style with more tips and presentational ideas than you can shake a stick at. If that's your idea of a good time.

Michael Breggar, the author of the popular and award winning "Auto-Magic" column in the International Brotherhood of Magicians monthly journal "The Linking Ring" brings a dozen of his favorite effects together in this volume. The tricks are sleight-of-hand free but brimming with entertaining possibilities.

Master launch photographer Ben Cooper captures readers' favorite subjects in a new light. Rather than presenting the standard "rocket lifting off the launch pad" images, he provides fresh perspectives. In addition to providing text about manned and unmanned crafts that will pique the interest of shuttle enthusiasts and newcomers alike, he shares wide-angle captures, night photographs, images shot from seldom-seen angles, and more. Readers will marvel over detailed photos of the shuttle before and after retirement, and juxtaposed with nature (Cape Canaveral's launch pages are surrounded by a national wildlife refuge), behind-the-scenes shots, images of the crafts rolling to the pad, and launching and landing too. Photographs of unmanned rockets, such as United Launch Alliance Delta II, Delta IV, and Atlas V rockets, which have been launching for a long time, plus the new era SpaceX, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy rockets, will please readers young and old.

Voted the Best Space Book of 2018 by the Space Hipsters The dramatic inside story of the epic search and recovery operation after the Columbia space shuttle disaster. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation’s eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts: Parallel Confusion Courage, Compassion, and Commitment Picking Up the Pieces A Bittersweet Victory For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible. Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.

A rich visual history of real and fictional space stations, illustrating pop culture's influence on the development of actual space stations and vice versa Space stations represent both the summit of space technology and, possibly, the future of humanity beyond Earth. Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space takes the reader deep into the heart of past, present, and future space stations, both real ones and those dreamed up in popular culture. This lavishly illustrated book explains the development of space stations from the earliest fictional visions through historical and current programs--including Skylab, Mir, and the International Space Station--and on to the dawning possibilities of large-scale space colonization. Engrossing narrative and striking images explore not only the spacecraft themselves but also how humans experience life aboard them, addressing everything from the development of efficient meal preparation methods to experiments in space-based botany. The book examines cutting-edge developments in government and commercial space stations, including NASA's Deep Space Habitats, the Russian Orbital Technologies Commercial Space Station, and China's Tiangong program. Throughout, Space Stations also charts the fascinating depiction of space stations in popular culture, whether in the form of children's toys, comic-book spacecraft, settings in science-fiction novels, or the backdrop to TV series and Hollywood movies. Space Stations is a beautiful and captivating history of the idea and the reality of the space station from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Inside the epic quest to find life on the water-rich moons at the outer reaches of the solar system Where is the best place to find life beyond Earth? We often look to Mars as the most promising site in our solar system, but recent scientific missions have revealed that some of the most habitable real estate may actually lie farther away. Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may have existed for as long as Earth, and together may contain more than fifty times its total volume of liquid water. Could there be organisms living in their depths? Alien Oceans reveals the science behind the thrilling quest to find out. Kevin Peter Hand is one of today's leading NASA scientists, and his pioneering research has taken him on expeditions around the world. In this captivating account of scientific discovery, he brings together insights from planetary science, biology, and the adventures of scientists like himself to explain how we know that oceans exist within moons of the outer solar system, like Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. He shows how the exploration of Earth's oceans is informing our understanding of the potential habitability of these icy moons, and draws lessons from what we have learned about the origins of life on our own planet to consider how life could arise on these distant worlds. Alien Oceans describes what lies ahead in our search for life in our solar system and beyond, setting the stage for the transformative discoveries that may await us.

Full color publication. This document has been produced and updated over a 21-year period. It is intended to be a handy reference document, basically one page per flight, and care has been exercised to make it as error-free as possible. This document is basically "as flown" data and has been compiled from many sources including flight logs, flight rules, flight anomaly logs, mod flight descent summary, post flight analysis of mps propellants, FDRD, FRD, SODB, and the MER shuttle flight data and inflight anomaly list. Orbit distance traveled is taken from the PAO mission statistics.

This book presents the complete story of the human lunar experience, including significant events in lunar science.

Selected as a Mission Specialist in 1978 in the first group of shuttle astronauts, Mike Mullane completed three missions and logged 356 hours aboard the Discovery and Atlantis shuttles. It was a dream come true. As a boy, Mullane could only read about space travel in science fiction, but the launch of Sputnik changed all that. Space flight became a possible dream and Mike Mullane set out to make it come true. In this absorbing memoir, Mullane gives the first-ever look into the often hilarious, sometime volatile dynamics of space shuttle astronauts - a class that included Vietnam War veterans, feminists, and propeller-headed scientists. With unprecedented candour, Mullane describes the chilling fear and unparalleled joy of space flight. As his career centred around the Challenger disaster, Mullane also recounts the heartache of burying his friends and colleagues. And he pulls no punches as he reveals the ins and outs of NASA, frank in his criticisms of the agency. A blast from start to finish, Riding Rockets is a straight-from-the-gut account of what it means to be an astronaut, just in time for this latest generation of stargazers.

Thousands of workers labored at Kennedy Space Center around the clock, seven days a week, for half a year to prepare a mission for the liftoff of Apollo 11. This is the story of what went on during those hectic six months. Countdown to a Moon Launch provides an in-depth look at the carefully choreographed workflow for an Apollo mission at KSC. Using the Apollo 11 mission as an example, readers will learn what went on day by day to transform partially completed stages and crates of parts into a ready-to-fly Saturn V. Firsthand accounts of launch pad accidents, near misses, suspected sabotage, and last-minute changes to hardware are told by more than 70 NASA employees and its contractors. A companion to Rocket Ranch, it includes many diagrams and photographs, some never before published, to illustrate all aspects of the process. NASA’s groundbreaking use of computers for testing and advanced management techniques are also covered in detail. This book will demystify the question of how NASA could build and launch Apollo missions using 1960s technology. You’ll discover that there was no magic involved – just an abundance of discipline, willpower, and creativity.