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In the Spring of 1961 President John Kennedy challenged his country to place humans on the moon and return them to Earth by the end of the decade. It seemed an audacious proposal to outside observers, but also to the heads of the two-year old National Aeronautics and Space Agency. What had been lost in the political cloud and excitement surrounding the President''s challenge was the fact that there were people in the aerospace community, outside of NASA, who were sure that a manned mission to the moon was possible within ten years, and they had known this since at least 1958, when NASA didn''t even exist. These enthusiastic advocates included the German rocket scientists working for the Army under Wernher von Braun; a team of military engineers working for the U.S. Air Force under General Bernard Schriever; and a team of engineers working under Conrad Lau at the Vought Aircraft Astronautics Division whose efforts remained largely unknown. Between the Spring of 1958 and Christmas 1959 Lau and his team worked out the most effective way to get to the moon using the advanced rockets being proposed by von Braun''s team. Following a visit by their ebullient congressman, Olin Teague, Vought''s manager John Clark sent Lau''s report to Abe Silverstein, head of manned space flight at NASA. Less than a month later Silverstein ordered his advanced design leader, Robert Piland, to essentially work from Lau''s ideas to create a modular spacecraft system for Apollo. It would be two years later that NASA would then adopt the method resurrected by Lau to leave the main spacecraft in lunar orbit to save fuel. Only ten copies of this report were distributed -- until now. Project MALLAR is the 100th book in the acclaimed Apogee Books'' Space Series.

In the first two months of 1958 President Eisenhower ordered the creation of a new department at the Pentagon, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. One of the first tasks appointed to ARPA was to choose which branch of the military would handle the countrys space program. Almost arbitrarily ARPA chose the Air Force. This decision stood for just a few months before the President announced the formation of NASA, but it became clear to the heads of the U.S. Army that they were running second in a two-horse race. The Pentagon would only be allowed into space if they could persuade the President that there was a military need to be there. Almost immediately the Air Force and the Army produced their rival visions for operating off-world. The Army team led by Generals Medaris and Trudeau turned to Wernher von Braun whose team presented a long-term plan based around their new one-million pound rocket the Juno V; but the Air Force went all-out and showed its plans for strategic domination by building a moon base. In March 1959 the Army responded with its own vision for a moon base which they called Project Horizon. The plan was conceived and presented to the President in June 1959 and was immediately recognised as a useful beginning for a civilian moon base, and so the report was reduced from 800 pages to 400 pages and given to NASA. Now, exactly sixty years later, three of the four volumes of the original military report are available here. Volume III still remains classified as SECRET. Reproduced from the actual copy of Horizon which was used to create the edited Civilian version. This version includes the original colour graphics. Bonus: In 1966 the Army was still working on its plans for space combat and some of those plans are included here as a bonus to Project Horizon.

On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, inaugurating the Space Age. To the general public and many politicians in the West the small satellite racing overhead was a shocking and frightening display of communist technological advance. But in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the headquarters of the United States'' Air Force, work had been underway since the end of World War II on the inevitability of space flight. The shock of Sputnik created an opportunity to bring this work into the light of day. During the 12 months between October 1957 and September 1958 engineers, doctors and a host of Air Force Colonels and Generals began a concerted effort to persuade President Eisenhower to allow them to take control of the United States'' future space efforts, and to place humans into space no later than 1960 and then send them to the surface of the moon by 1964. In February 1958, without going through the usual gauntlet of hearings the Air Force brass were informed that they were in charge of the country''s space program. Emboldened by this unexpected surprise a team of more than 60 Air Force staff quickly put together a long-range plan for the exploration of space. This new plan included the evolution of Air Force missiles from the Thor, through the Titan, to the Super-Titan and ultimately to the 2,200,000 lb thrust "Big B" booster. The proposed spacecraft carried acronym names like MISS, MISSOPH, LUREC and finally LUMAN, for the manned lunar lander. This book includes the official Air Force history of these events, for many years classified as "SECRET". It explains how many of these ideas ended up being adopted by NASA and led to the Space Race of the 1960s. Included with this book is a CD-ROM featuring documents from the early USAF plans for a moon landing.

A Pictorial Verbal History of the Space Station. pages full glossy colour

Space junkies and armchair astronauts are provided with comprehensive, handy references for a variety of space-related missions, vehicles, and concepts in this pocket-sized series. Compiled with the cooperation of NASA, each topic-specific reference features relevant statistics, photographs, and the stories behind each project. Books on manned missions include crew photographs, information on patches and equipment, and flight statistics such as time in space, distance traveled, and mission objectives. Photographs and statistics for launch vehicles, orbiters, probes, and experimental equipment are featured in each equipment-specific reference. Flight data and images for all of the unmanned deep space probes, including Cassini, Deep Space One, Galileo, Huygens, NEAR, Pioneer 10 and 11, Stardust, and Voyager 1 and 2, are featured in this examination of astronomers' attempts to understand the outer reaches of the universe.

If you always thought that it was Giovanni Schiaparelli who first coined the phrase ''Canali'' pertaining to the straight lines he appeared to observe on Mars you''d be wrong. In 1858 an astronomer working at the Vatican observatory named father Pietro Angelo Secchi took it upon himself to create his own drawings of Mars. The red planet was now nearing a close approach to earth and the powerful Vatican telescope was capable of resolving detail previously invisible to most astronomers. Secchi thought he saw a series of straight lines on the Martian surface so he made an innocuous notation in his notes. His sketches and articles were published in 1859 in which he referred several times to ''Canale Atlantico'' or ''Canale Ceruleo''. His regrettable choice of words would not have an impact for another eight years. This volume tells not only of people and places that have influenced mankind''s relationship with the enigmatic red planet, but it also shows you the colour drawings that Secchi made, which were provided to us directly by the Vatican itself. Along with many other interesting stories, drawings and photographs this book will be a prize for both the novice or ardent student of Mars.

NASA''s ambitious but essential Gemini Program was culminated in November 1966 with the launch of Gemini 12 from Kennedy Space enter''s Launch Complex 19. This tenth manned Gemini mission was the final opportunity to develop and practice many new techniques that were integral to the upcoming Apollo program. With the successful conclusion of the Gemini 12 mission, veteran astronaut Command Pilot James Lovell had set another new record with a total of 18 days in space, and Pilot Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin held the EVA duration record with an umbilical EVA at the Agena work station of 2 hours and 9 minutes. In all, three EVA (extra-vehicular activity) sessions were performed during the mission. Going into the Gemini 12 mission, many questions of EVA procedure were still unresolved. In the past, astronauts had expended too much energy simply staying in position. In an effort to better develop techniques and train astronauts, for the first time, underwater simulation was incorporated into EVA training. Using a submerged mock-up of the Gemini-Agena spacecraft, EVA training proceeded almost to the eve of launch. Training in the neutral-buoyancy underwater simulation allowed the astronauts to practice the entire EVA procedure in a single session -- just as they would be required to do in space. This was a major advance over simulated weightlessness in aircraft parabolic flights, which provided only 30 seconds of weightlessness at a stretch. Gemini 12 successfully executed a fuelless station-keeping exercise for 4 hours and 20 minutes with the use of a dacron tether between the Gemini and Agena vehicles. Once the tether had been pulled taut, the reaction control systems for both vehicles were turned off, and the slight difference in the Earth''s gravitational effect on the two space vehicles was sufficient to keep the tether taut, so the two spacecraft remained at a constant separation, without the use of any reaction control fuel. Despite mission changes brought on by a radar lock-on failure and by a malfunction of the Agena Primary Propulsion System (PPS), the Gemini 12 mission was considered to be a major success, continuing the success story of the entire Gemini program. Apollo could take man to the Moon only after Gemini had introduced him to the space environment and taught him how to perform there. CD included.