Breaking the Chains of Gravity - The Story of Spaceflight before NASA

Amy Shira Teitel

Bloomsbury Sigma

2016

304 páginas

10h 8m

ISBN-13: 9781472911179

NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969, but its prehistory is an important and rarely told tale. America's space agency drew together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. At the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun escaped Nazi Germany and came to America where he began developing missiles for the United States Army. The engineer behind the V-2 rocket, von Braun dreamt of sending rockets into space. Ten years later his Jupiter rocket was the only one capable of launching a satellite into orbit.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the U.S. Air Force, meanwhile, brought rocket technology into the world of manned flight. NACA test pilots like Neil Armstrong flew cutting-edge aircraft in the thin upper atmosphere while Air Force pilots rode to the fringes of space in balloons to see how humans handled radiation at high altitude.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity looks at the evolving roots of America's space program--the scientific advances, the personalities, and the rivalries between the various arms of the United States military. After the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, getting a man in space suddenly became a national imperative, leading President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pull various pieces together to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

Assunto extremamente interessante

História da tecnologia dos foguetes na Alemanha e EUA até a criação da NASA. Não aborda o que aconteceu na URSS. O que faria o livro ser enorme, e talvez confuso.

Para nós, Brasileiros, haverá muita informação desconhecida. Acredite.

Só a título de curiosidade, o livro chama a atenção para os vídeos educativos/propaganda que o governo dos EUA fizeram com ajuda de Walt Disney sobre a corrida espacial. Estão disponíveis no YouTube. Super interessantes (e informativos).