Space Memoir

In 1610, Galileo published the Siderius nuncius, or Starry Messenger, a "hurried little masterpiece" in John Heilbron's words. Presenting to the world his remarkable observations using the recently invented telescope, Galileo dramatically challenged our idea of the perfection of the heavens and the centrality of the Earth in the universe. Indeed, the appearance of the little book is regarded as one of the great moments in the history of science.

Thirty years ago a flying saucer hovered over the little town of Mart, Texas. Martites looked up and saw it, and a few took photos of it. When a newspaper asked the mayor of Mart about it, he said, "IT couldn't have been much or it would have never come to Mart." But the Mayor may have been wrong, for Martians may well have visited Mart back in the 1950s, when the author of this book was growing up there. Childhood betrayals, incessant drought, unreasonable parents, dogmatic grammarians, and kids who just didn't fit in might have all been engineered by visiting but invisible creatures from ...

Leanne Friesen thought she knew a lot about bereavement. She had studied it in school and preached at memorial services. But only when her own sister died from cancer did she learn, in her very bones, what grieving people don't need—and what they do. In Grieving Room, Friesen writes with vulnerability, wisdom, and somehow even wit about the stark and sacred lessons learned at deathbeds and funerals, and pushes back against a world that wants to minimize our sorrow and avoid our despair.

Why don’t we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented his computing machine, and because the developers of the far-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas from him. Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of John Atanasoff with technical clarity and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.

In 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. Suddenly Silicon Valley, not NASA, was the epicentre of the new Space Age. Start-ups and investors began to realise that the heavens - ungoverned and unregulated - were open for business. When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied race to control access to outer space. Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies - Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs and Rocket Lab - as they attempt to launch thousands of low-cost rockets and satellites into orbit.

When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person. He was neither. In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity's greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn't rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires.

We now know that the universe is mostly dark, made up of particles and forces undetectable by our most powerful telescopes. The discovery signaled a Copernican-like revolution in astronomy: not only are we not the center of the universe, neither is the stuff of which we're made. Vera Rubin played a pivotal role in this discovery. By showing that some astronomical objects seem to defy gravity, Rubin helped convince the scientific community of the possibility of dark matter. In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, Ashley Jean Yeager tells the story of Rubin's life and work.

The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical narratives by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. This audiobook vividly describes how, before 1900, a woman who wanted to study the stars had to have a father, brother, or husband to provide entry, and how the considerable intellectual skills of women astronomers were still not enough to enable them to pry open doors of opportunity for much of the twentieth century. After decades of difficult struggles, women are closer to equality in astronomy than ever before.

His face is instantly recognisable. His name is shorthand for genius. Today, he's a figurehead as much as a man, symbolic of things larger than himself: of scientific progress, of the human mind, even of the age. But who was Einstein really? The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovered relativity, black holes and E = mc2, dined with Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood and was the inspiration for element 99, Albert Einstein was also a high school dropout with an FBI file 1,400 pages long. In this audiobook, Samuel Graydon's writing brings history's most famous scientist back to life.

People like to say, "It's not rocket science." But Fallingstar's father designed space rockets and satellites, so in her childhood it was all rocket science. Fallingstar's rollicking trajectory from a Republican cold war upbringing to Pagan Priestess is a unique, yet utterly relatable portrait of a culture growing from denial to awareness.

Antes de conquistar Marte, debemos aprender a sobrevivir en el espacio. Un libro ejemplar sobre el triunfo de la imaginación humana, la fuerza de voluntad y las maravillas infinitas de la galaxia. Scott Kelly es el hombre que más tiempo ha pasado en el espacio, 340 días, durante los cuales ha visto y vivido cosas que prácticamente ninguno de nosotros veremos o experimentaremos nunca.

Directing his polemics against the pedantry of his time, Galileo, as his own popularizer, addressed his writings to contemporary laymen. His support of Copernican cosmology, against the Church’s strong opposition, his development of a telescope, and his unorthodox opinions as a philosopher of science were the central concerns of his career and the subjects of four of his most important writings. Drake’s introductory essay place them in their biographical and historical context.

As a minority in a predominantly white institution, taking up space is an act of resistance. And in higher education, feeling like you constantly have to justify your existence within institutions that weren't made for you is an ongoing struggle for many people. Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi, two recent Cambridge graduates, wrote Taking Up Space as a guide and a manifesto for change: tackling issues of access, unrepresentative curricula, discrimination in the classroom, the problems of activism and life before and after university.

Deborah Santana is best known for her marriage to music icon Carlos Santana - a 30-year bond that endures to this day. But as a girl growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s, daughter of a White mother and a Black father - the legendary blues guitarist Saunders King - her life was charged with its own drama long before she married.

Homer Hickam recalls his first years as a NASA engineer, while also telling the story of his fluffy black and white cat Paco, who had the magic ability to make people smile and give them hope. But when Paco was struck down by a disease that left him unable to walk, Hickam was faced with a terrible decision, let his beloved cat live in misery or put him to sleep. Before that decision could be made, the space mission Hickam was working on needed to be rescued and there was only one sure way to save it: Paco's magic meow!

Galileo's oldest child was 13 when he placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her support was her father's greatest source of strength. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from Italian and masterfully woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose 17th-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion.

Get up close and personal with science as Andrew Kessler narrates his hilarious journey inside NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission - a historic enterprise manned by a motley crew of rocket scientists. The Phoenix Mars mission was the first man-made probe ever sent to the Martian arctic.

In 2013, Kate Greene moved to Mars. That is, along with five fellow crew members, she embarked on NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. For four months she lived, worked, and slept in an isolated geodesic dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates and gaining incredible insight into human behavior in tight quarters, as well as the nature of boredom, dreams, and isolation that arise amidst the promise of scientific progress and glory.

Noah Adams's adventure in search of Wilbur and Orville Wright is a journey that takes him across the country as he follows in the footsteps of the famous brothers in an attempt to know them more deeply, not just as inventors and pilots but as individuals as well.

Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the 20th century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called "the day without yesterday".