The First Men in Space
Kennedy, Gregory P
From the Series "World Explorers"
With an Introduction Essay by Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot, Apollo 11
"Our great-grandchildren will read and study about the birth of a new era, how a trail to the endless universe was blazed by the children of the Earth."
- Cosmonaut Gherman Titov
By today's standards it was a primitive craft - a crude-looking spherical object just large enough to hold a single human passenger. Thrown into outer space by a small booster rocket, it orbited the earth once and then fell back through the atmosphere like a spent cannonball. At 26,000 feet a man was violently ejected from the sphere; a parachute blossomed above him and he floated gently down to the ground. The date was April 12, 1961, and the man's name Yury Gagarin - would thenceforward be mentioned in conjunction with the names of such explorers as Columbus and Magellan, Marco Polo and Robert Peary, for Cosmonaut Gagarin was the first human to journey beyond the boundary of the earth's atmosphere, and a new age of discovery had begun. The men and women who followed Gagarin in those exhilarating and perilous first years of space exploration, astronauts such as Alan Shepard and John Glenn and cosmonauts such as Gherman Titov and Valentina Tereshkova, were the first to venture into the new, infinite frontier, and their experiences forever changed our vision of ourselves and the tiny planet that is our home.
Hardcover
112 Seiten / pages
with many photos
very good condition, with a name sticker of the previous owner
New York - Philadelphia - 1991 - Chelsea House Publishers
Art.Nr. 25633
