More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA

The former head of a lunar mining operation returns to the moon and is immediately sucked into a dangerous morass of labor troubles, lies, larceny, and corporate wrongdoing in this wildly entertaining science fiction thrill ride There is big trouble on the moon. The blue-collar working stiffs of Descartes Station, who mine the surface for minerals and the North Pole for water, have become increasingly dissatisfied with Skycorp’s general disregard for its employees’ well-being. Following the most recent spate of layoffs, the labor strike grumblings have only grown louder, so the company is sending former base administrator and recovering alcoholic Lester Riddell back into the fold in an attempt to boost morale and output alike. The truth, however, becomes shockingly apparent to Riddell almost immediately upon his return. Not only has he been unceremoniously dumped into a muddled mess of larceny, piracy, and corporate malfeasance, it appears that Skycorp is purposely setting him up to fail—which could spell finis for Descartes Station and every trash-talking, pot-smoking, porn-loving Vacuum Sucker and Moondog who toils there. But as the Skycorp suits are about to discover, they’ve just made the biggest mistake of their corporate lives—because Lester Riddell is nobody’s fall guy. Three-time Hugo Award winner Allen Steele has seen the near future, and it isn’t pretty—it’s noisy, dirty, dangerous, and chaotic. Thrilling, wildly inventive, delightfully profane, and totally outrageous, Lunar Descent is one hell of rocket ride, with a master of science fiction at the helm.

A direct descent is one in which the main descent propulsion system burns continuously from lunar approach to touchdown. The characteristic velocity requirement for direct lunar descents is presented as a function of the landing site location relative to the normal impact point. Results are included for translunar trip times of 60, 75, and 90 hours, for specific impulses representative of both Earth storable and cryogenic propulsion systems, for landing sites located anywhere on the lunar surface, and for ignition thrust-to-Earth weight ratios between 0.12 and 10.0. The data presented are useful in determining approximate performance capability and in evaluating tradeoffs during preliminary mission planning studies.

Chief engineer Thomas J. Kelly gives a firsthand account of designing, building, testing, and flying the Apollo lunar module. It was, he writes, “an aerospace engineer’s dream job of the century.” Kelly’s account begins with the imaginative process of sketching solutions to a host of technical challenges with an emphasis on safety, reliability, and maintainability. He catalogs numerous test failures, including propulsion-system leaks, ascent-engine instability, stress corrosion of the aluminum alloy parts, and battery problems, as well as their fixes under the ever-present constraints of budget and schedule. He also recaptures the exhilaration of hearing Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong report that “The Eagle has landed,” and the pride of having inadvertently provided a vital “lifeboat” for the crew of the disabled Apollo 13.

Fixed base simulation of two guidance schemes for manned lunar landing.

The Apollo 11 Mission, primarily designed to land men on the Moon and return them safely to Earth, signaled a new phase of the manned space program. Based on the success of Apollo 11, the first of a series of missions designed for the systematic exploration of the Moon was successfully accomplished on Apollo 12. The fact that the Apollo 12 astronauts were able to achieve a pinpoint landing at a preselected site, and then spend an extended time on the lunar surface, graphically illustrates the rapid progress of the Apollo program. The Apollo 12 mission added significantly to man's knowledge of the Moon. The precise landing capability allowed the crew to accomplish a wide variety of preplanned tasks and paved the way for planning future missions to smaller, more selected landing areas with the possibility of significant scientific returns. The publication includes chapters on mission description, summary of scientific results, photographic summary of the Apollo 12 Mission, crew observations, passive seismic experiment, lunar surface magnetometer experiment, the solar-wind spectrometer experiment, suprathermal ion detector experiment (lunar ionosphere detector), cold cathode gage (lunar atmosphere detector), the solar-wind composition experiment, Apollo 12 multispectral photography experiment, preliminary geologic investigation of the Apollo 12 landing site, lunar surface closeup stereoscopic photography, preliminary examination of lunar samples, and preliminary results from Surveyor 3 analysis.

The New York Times bestselling, “meticulously researched and absorbingly written” (The Washington Post) story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic Apollo 11 moon mission. President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel. When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience—with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than US astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send twenty-four astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969. “A veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch—nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote” (The Wall Street Journal) and in One Giant Leap, Fishman has written the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises—from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. “It’s been 50 years since Neil Armstrong took that one small step. Fishman explains in dazzling form just how unbelievable it actually was” (Newsweek).

This book describes the future of the Artemis Lunar Program from the years 2017 to about 2030. Despite the uncertainty of the times and the present state of space exploration, it is likely that what is presented in this book will actually happen, to one degree or another. As history has taught us, predictions are often difficult, but one can see enough into the future to be somewhat accurate. As the Bible says, “Wesee thru the glass, but darkly.” All of the elements of the proposed program are described from several perspectives: NASA’s, the commercial space industry and our International partners. Also included are descriptions of the many vehicles, habitats, landers, payloads and experiments. The book tells the story of the buildup of a very small space station in a strange new lunar orbit and the descent of payloads and humans, including the first women and next man, to the lunar surface with the intent to evolve a sustained presence over time.