Now with an Historical Afterword by Ron MillerIncludes the original illustrations Featured in Ron Millers _The Conquest of Space Book Series.Ó One of the most obscure and fascinating of all pre-spaceflight books, this fictional "autobiography" by _Akkad Pseudoman (E.F. Northrup) includes detailed descriptions (with photos and a technical appendix) of the first-ever practical experiments with an electromagnetic railgun. Originally published in 1937. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

A translation from German of a 1929 treatise by the author. Deals with the problem of the space travel. Expresses ideas about rocketry and space travel. Extensive treatment of the engineering aspects of a space station. Extensive bibliography. 100 drawings.

The Space Age is nearly 50 years old but exploration of the outer planets and beyond has only just begun. Deep-Space Probes Second Edition draws on the latest research to explain why we should explore beyond the edge of the Solar System and how we can build highly sophisticated robot spacecraft to make the journey. Many technical problems remain to be solved, among them propulsion systems to permit far higher velocities, and technologies to build vehicles a fraction of the size of today’s spacecraft. Beyond the range of effective radio control, robot vehicles for exploring deep space will need to be intelligent, ‘thinking’ craft – able to make vital decisions entirely on their own. Gregory Matloff also looks at the possibility for human travel into interstellar space, and some of the immense problems that such journeys would entail. This second edition includes an entirely new chapter on holographic message plaques for future interstellar probes – a NASA-funded project.

Even as America and Russia stepped up their efforts in the early 1960s to design ever faster bombers and put men and equipment into space, Britain quietly set to work devising its own hypersonic aircraft and manned space vehicles. British Secret Projects 5: Britain's Space Shuttletells the story of how, from 1963 to 1966, English Electric/BAC's Preston works secretly led the world in re-useable spacecraft design. A huge variety of designs formed the P.42 project with more than 100 proposals for hypersonic interceptors, bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, satellite launchers, spacecraft launchers, orbital spy planes and satellite killers. The end result was the 'Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device' (MUSTARD), which pre-dated the USA's Space Shuttle program by six years. Based on unique access to the original project drawings, photographs, archives and interviews with surviving members of the design team, British Secret Projects 5: Britain's Space Shuttleoffers a unique insight into this hitherto little-known chapter in the secret history of the UK manned space flight program.

In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end. Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and cultural atmosphere -- made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. Rocket Dreams is about those solutions...about the places where the space program landed. In Rocket Dreams, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "church" of Noëtic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent. In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space. Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.