The New York Times bestseller about the strange history of NASA and its cover-ups regarding its origins and extraterrestrial architecture found on the moon and Mars is even more interesting in its new edition.
Authors Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara include a new chapter about the discoveries made by ex-Nazi scientist and NASA stalwart Wernher von Braun regarding what he termed "alternate gravitational solutions," or the rewriting of Newtonian physics into hyperdimensional spheres.
Buyers of the new edition will be provided a code that will enable them to log on to DarkMission.net to download hundreds of images discussed within the book.
About this product: Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding.
To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in "How NASA Builds Teams"—an approach that is proven, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA’s most complex systems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA Builds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can be applied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-line behavioral assessment to help your team and the individual members understand each other and measure the key driver of team performance, the social context.
Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to the art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system to analyze the characteristics of team performance into actionable elements.
The author illustrates the teambuilding process with entertaining stories from his decade as NASA’s Director for Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror.
Free downloadable resources will help you:
Identify your teammates’ innate personalities
Diagram your culture (And compare it to your customer’s)
Measure the coherency of your project’s paradigm (Get this wrong and you will be fired!) and
Learn to meet people’s need to feel valued by you.
Further, you can download and use Pellerin’s most powerful tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the Context Shifting Worksheet.
About this product: This fascinating book – now updated and available in paperback to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA in 2008 – tells the remarkable history of America’s unrivalled contribution to the exploration of space from the early twentieth century to the present. Award-winning historian Michael H. Gorn covers every US space mission ever undertaken, including those of projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and the development of the Space Shuttle, and brings the story up to date by explaining the functions of NASA’s two windows in space: the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. This is the first illustrated history of NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – ever to be published. It reveals the personalities involved – the personal ambitions and temperaments of astronauts, scientists and engineers, and the influence of America’s presidents on the US space programme – as much as the technological advances that have made space exploration possible. Authoritatively and engagingly written, the book is profusely illustrated throughout with 500 stunning photographs.
On July 20, 1969, US astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. The Apollo 11 mission that carried him and his two fellow astronauts on their epic journey marked the successful culmination of a quest that, ironically, had begun in Nazi Germany thirty years before. This is the story of the Apollo 11 mission and the ‘space hardware’ that made it all possible. Author Chris Riley looks at the evolution and design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Modules, and the Lunar Module. He also describes the space suits worn by the crew, with their special life support systems. Launch procedures are described, ‘flying’ the Saturn V, navigation, course correction ‘burns’, orbital rendezvous techniques, flying the LEM, moon landing, moon walk, take-off from the moon, and earth re-entry procedure. Includes performance data, fuels, biographies of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, Gene Kranz and Werner von Braun. Detailed appendices cover all of the Apollo missions, with full details of crews, spacecraft names and logos, mission priorities, moon landing sites, and the Lunar Rover.
Artists, like astronauts, are constantly probing into the unknown. It is fitting that, shortly after the establishment of NASA in 1958, the NASA Art Program was created on the principle that artists are uniquely equipped to interpret and document the experience of space exploration. In the program’s early years, artists as diverse as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and James Wyeth participated. Over time, the Art Program has commissioned work from many of the world’s most distinguished artists. The collection includes works by Alexander Calder, Nam June Paik, William Wegman, Mike and Doug Starn, Vija Celmins, and Annie Leibovitz.
Along with a two-year touring exhibition with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), NASA/Art celebrates the 50th anniversary of NASA in October 2008 with an expanded selection of the best work created for the NASA Art Program, and stands as a lasting record of the impact of space exploration on the artistic imagination.
About this product: Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy.Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning - especially in public organizations - is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA's loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.
About this product: This awe-inspiring collection of photographs gives those of us stuck on Earth a glimpse of what our home planet looks like from the window of a space craft... and the big blue marble has never looked more beautiful. All the continents are shown, as well as weather events, the Aurora borealis, and the visible effects of anthropogenic environmental change--deforestation and desertification chief among them. Take a sobering look at our lovely planet and realize how small and fragile it really is.
About this product: NASA launches a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary in the fall of 2007, and Abrams is privileged to publish this visual history of its many achievements in manned and unmanned space travel. Written and edited by a team of experienced NASA staffers, and illustrated with many unpublished and rare photographs from the voluminous NASA archives scattered across the country, America in Space offers an unparalleled vision of half a century of exploration and discovery.
The story of America’s space age is told with more than 400 carefully selected images. The story begins in the 1950s with intrepid test pilots venturing ever faster and higher, and opens out into the now-legendary Mercury and Apollo missions of the 1960s that made astronauts into national heroes. The space shuttle era shows us what everyday space travel might look like, while grand vistas of the universe expand our sense of wonder. The large format of the book captures both the human drama and the vast scale of NASA’s projects. America in Space is a photographic record of the greatest adventure of our time.
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, millions of Americans became bound together in a single, historic moment. Many still vividly remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the tragedy. In The Challenger Launch Decision, Diane Vaughan recreates the steps leading up to that fateful decision, contradicting conventional interpretations to prove that what occurred at NASA was not skulduggery or misconduct but a disastrous mistake.
Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.
Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.
No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.
Packed with never-before-seen materials, this reference is a complete guide to the Apollo 17 mission and includes press releases from the launch as well as NASA mission reports. Easily accessible NASA resources pair with mission details and accomplishments—from biographical information on each of the three crew members to the use of and great distances covered by the lunar rover—to create the most authoritative study of the Apollo 17 mission available. A companion DVD, featuring an exclusive interview with astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the moon, is also included.
Includes DVD-ROM (Gene Cernan interview, home movies of training, and over 3600 photos of the mission).