"A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile--originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead--and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin. And he is about to make history. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour--ten times faster than a rifle bullet--Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing...

The U.S. may have put the first man on the moon, but it was the Soviet space program that made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. It took years to catch up, but soon NASA's first female astronauts were racing past milestones of their own. The trail-blazing women of Group 9, NASA's first mixed gender class, had the challenging task of convincing the powers that be that a woman's place is in space, but they discovered that NASA had plenty...

The story of manned spaceflight is a tale of visionaries, scientists, and heroes. Discover an unfailingly detailed account of this glorious endeavour, from the first launch of unmanned spacecraft to the establishment of the International Space Station and beyond.