Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA's Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director's role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy's commitment to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy's pledge, and Apollo 13. He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. (In the film Apollo 13, Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.) In Failure Is Not an Option, Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers' only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids - still in their twenties, only a few years out of college - who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success. Read more

The bold story of Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician who worked for NASA during the space race and was depicted in the film Hidden Figures.You've likely heard of the historic Apollo 13 moon landing. But do you know about the mathematical genius who made sure that Apollo 13 returned safely home? As a child, Katherine Johnson loved to count. She counted the steps on the road, the number of dishes and spoons she washed in the kitchen sink, everything! Boundless, curious, and excited by calculations, young Katherine longed to know as much as she could about math, about the universe. From Katherine's early beginnings as a gifted student to her heroic accomplishments as a prominent mathematician at NASA, Counting on Katherine is the story of a groundbreaking American woman who not only calculated the course of moon landings but, in turn, saved lives and made enormous contributions to history.Christy Ottaviano Books Read more

Apollo is the behind-the-scenes story of an epic achievement. Based on exhaustive research that included many exclusive interviews, Apollo tells how America went from a standing start to a landing on the moon at a speed that now seems impossible. It describes the unprecedented engineering challenges that had to be overcome to create the mammoth Saturn V and the facilities to launch it. It takes you onto the gantries at Cape Canaveral and behind the consoles of Houston's Mission Control as it relives the tragedy of the fire on Apollo 1, the first descent to the lunar surface, and the rescue of Apollo 13. A story of daring bordering on recklessness on the ground and life-and-death decisions made in seconds during the flights, Apollo captures the drama of humans leaving Earth for the first time. Read more

An all-new recording of the landmark number one best seller!In April 1970, during the glory days of the Apollo space program, NASA sent Navy Captain Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America's fifth mission to the moon. Only 55 hours into the flight of Apollo 13, disaster struck: a mysterious explosion rocked the ship, and soon its oxygen and power began draining away. Written with all the color and drama of the best fiction, Apollo 13 (previously published as Lost Moon) tells the full story of the moon shot that almost ended in catastrophe. Minutes after the explosion, the three astronauts are forced to abandon the main ship for the lunar module, a tiny craft designed to keep two men alive for just two days. As the hours tick away, the narrative shifts from the crippled spacecraft to Mission Control, from engineers searching desperately for a way to fix the ship to Lovell's wife and children praying for his safe return. The entire nation watches as one crisis after another is met and overcome. By the time the ship splashes down in the Pacific, we understand why the heroic effort to rescue Lovell and his crew is considered by many to be NASA's finest hour Decades after the launch of the mission, Jim Lovell and coauthor Jeffrey Kluger offer an incisive look at America's waxing and waning love affair with space exploration during the past three decades, culminating only recently when the Apollo 13 spacecraft itself, long consigned to an aviation museum outside Paris, was at last returned to its rightful home in the United States. The story of Apollo 13 is a timeless tribute to the enduring American spirit and sparkling individual heroism.  Read more

NATIONAL BESTSELLER. Astronaut Jim Lovell and coauthor Jeffrey Kluger’s harrowing account of the Apollo 13 disaster. Serving as the basis for Ron Howard’s blockbuster Apollo 13, the book reveals true details not shown in the movie. Thrilling and evocative, you feel as though you’re alongside Lovell in the lunar module. Written with all the color and drama of the best fiction, Apollo 13 tells the full story of the moon shot that almost ended in catastrophe. Minutes after a mid-flight explosion, the three astronauts are forced to abandon the main ship for the lunar module, a tiny craft designed to keep two men alive for just two days.?As the hours tick away, the narrative shifts from the crippled spacecraft to Mission Control, from engineers searching desperately for a way to fix the ship to Lovell's wife and children praying for his safe return. The entire nation watches as one crisis after another is met and overcome. By the time the ship splashes down in the Pacific, we understand why the heroic effort to rescue Lovell and his crew is considered by many to be NASA's finest hour.?Inspiring and astonishing, the story of Apollo 13 is a timeless tribute to the enduring American spirit and sparkling individual heroism. Read more

This New York Times bestselling memoir of a veteran NASA flight director tells riveting stories from the early days of the Mercury program through Apollo 11 (the moon landing) and Apollo 13, for both of which Kranz was flight director.Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America’s manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA’s Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director’s role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy’s commitment to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the Moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers’ only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success. A fascinating firsthand account by a veteran mission controller of one of America’s greatest achievements, Failure Is Not an Option reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now. Read more

The struggle to kill the BP Macondo gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is the Apollo 13 of our time—this is the thrilling story of the nightmare well and the men who conquered it in dangerous waters.Suspensful and illuminating, Joel Achenbach offers a groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the Gulf’s waters, BP engineers and government scientists—awkwardly teamed in Houston—raced to devise ways to plug the Macondo well. Achenbach, a veteran reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was like behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the well. The government did not have the means to solve the problem; only the private sector had the tools, and it didn’t have the right ones as the country became haunted by Macondo’s black plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging technical maneuvers on the seafloor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation into what went wrong in the deep sea. A confounding mystery and an engineering whodunit, the lessons of this tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look more closely at the highly engineered society that surrounds us. Read more

An “exciting” minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston (The New York Times). On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in incomparably grave danger. Faced with below-freezing temperatures, a seriously ill crewmember, and a dwindling water supply, a safe return seemed unlikely.Thirteen is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for the New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings readers unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.    Read more

The struggle to kill the BP Macondo gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is the Apollo 13 of our time—this is the thrilling story of the nightmare well and the men who conquered it in dangerous waters.Suspensful and illuminating, Joel Achenbach offers a groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the Gulf’s waters, BP engineers and government scientists—awkwardly teamed in Houston—raced to devise ways to plug the Macondo well. Achenbach, a veteran reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was like behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the well. The government did not have the means to solve the problem; only the private sector had the tools, and it didn’t have the right ones as the country became haunted by Macondo’s black plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging technical maneuvers on the seafloor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation into what went wrong in the deep sea. A confounding mystery and an engineering whodunit, the lessons of this tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look more closely at the highly engineered society that surrounds us. Read more

The extraordinary autobiography of astronaut Fred Haise, one of only 24 men to fly to the moonIn the gripping Never Panic Early, Fred Haise,Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 13, offers a detailed firsthand account of when disaster struck three days into his mission to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded, a crewmate uttered the now iconic words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and the world anxiously watched as one of history’s most incredible rescue missions unfolded. Haise brings readers into the heart of his experience on the challenging mission--considered NASA’s finest hour--and reflects on his life and career as an Apollo astronaut. In this personal and illuminating memoir, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, Haise takes an introspective look at the thrills and triumphs, regrets and disappointments, and lessons that defined his career, including his years as a military fighter pilot and his successful 20-year NASA career that would have made him the sixth man on the moon had Apollo 13 gone right. Many of his stories navigate fear, hope, and resilience, like when he crashed while ferrying a World War II air show aircraft and suffered second and third-degree burns over 65 percent of his body, putting him in critical condition for ten days before making a heroic recovery. In Never Panic Early, Haise explores what it was like to work for NASA in its glory years and demonstrates a true ability to deal with the unexpected. Read more

The untold story of the historic voyage to the moon that closed out one of our darkest years with a nearly unimaginable triumphIn August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind’s first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were summoned to a secret meeting and told of the dangerous mission, they instantly signed on.Written with all the color and verve of the best narrative non-fiction, Apollo 8 takes us from Mission Control to the astronaut’s homes, from the test labs to the launch pad. The race to prepare an untested rocket for an unprecedented journey paves the way for the hair-raising trip to the moon. Then, on Christmas Eve, a nation that has suffered a horrendous year of assassinations and war is heartened by an inspiring message from the trio of astronauts in lunar orbit. And when the mission is over―after the first view of the far side of the moon, the first earth-rise, and the first re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere following a flight to deep space―the impossible dream of walking on the moon suddenly seems within reach. The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Jeffrey Kluger―Jim Lovell’s co-author on their bestselling book about Apollo 13―can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet. Read more

"Houston, we've had a problem." On April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft were headed to the moon when a sudden explosion rocked the ship. Oxygen levels began depleting rapidly. Electrical power began to fail. Astronauts James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were about to be stranded in the inky void of outer space. The mission to the moon was scrapped. Now, Apollo 13's only goal was to bring the crew home. With the damaged spacecraft hurtling towards the moon at roughly six thousand miles per hour, there was little hope of success. But the astronauts and mission control were fully prepared to do whatever it took to return the crew to Earth. This space disaster occurred at the peak of the United States' Space Race against the Soviet Union. But for four days in 1970, the two nations put aside their differences, and the entire world watched the skies, hoping and praying the astronauts would return safely. As missions to Mars and commercial space flight become a reality, the time is now to be reminded of our common humanity, of how rivals can work together and support each other towards a shared goal. Because no matter what happens or where we travel, we all call Earth home. Read more

(Essential Elements Band Folios). A collection of popular movie songs arranged to be played by either full band or by individual soloists with optional accompaniment CD or tape. Each arrangement is correlated with a specific page in the Essential Elements Band Method Books. Includes: Forrest Gump - Main Title, The John Dunbar Theme, Theme from "Jurassic Park," Raiders March, Chariots of Fire, Apollo 13, Somewhere Out There, Man from Snowy River, Star Trek - The Motion Picture, Theme from E.T., and Back to the Future. Read more

This fascinating view of lunar imagery explores visual representations of the moon from the dawn of photography to the present Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, Apollo’s Muse honors the rich history of photographic representations of the moon, from rarely seen early daguerreotypes to contemporary video art. Engaging and accessible, the book explores how photographers captured this celestial body—and how the images have in turn inspired artists, writers, and scientists.    The book’s wide-ranging focus includes extraordinary reproductions of the first successful series of lunar daguerreotypes by the American photographer John Adams Whipple, along with film stills from Voyage dans la Lune (1902) by Georges Méliès; American “paper moon” studio portraits; images from the Apollo mission; and works by contemporary artists, including Vija Celmins, Roy Lichtenstein, Aleksandra Mir, Vik Muniz, Nam June Paik, and Robert Rauschenberg. Related prints, drawings, paintings, and astronomical instruments explore artists’ fascination with the moon, as an object of both art and science. A foreword by actor Tom Hanks, star of the award-winning 1995 film Apollo 13, outlines the importance of lunar images to art and cinema, reinforcing the universal fascination with representations of the cosmos.

(Essential Elements Band Folios). A collection of popular movie songs arranged to be played by either full band or by individual soloists with optional accompaniment CD or tape. Each arrangement is correlated with a specific page in the Essential Elements Band Method Books. Includes: Forrest Gump - Main Title, The John Dunbar Theme, Theme from "Jurassic Park," Raiders March, Chariots of Fire, Apollo 13, Somewhere Out There, Man from Snowy River, Star Trek - The Motion Picture, Theme from E.T., and Back to the Future. Read more