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Piercing the Horizon - The Story of Visionary NASA Chief Tom Paine (Hardcover)
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Piercing the Horizon - The Story of Visionary NASA Chief Tom Paine (Hardcover)
Series: Purdue Series in Aeronautics and Astronautics
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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We all know the names: Grissom, Armstrong, Cernan-legends of the
space age whose names resonate with people around the world and
whose deeds need no introduction. We know less about the men who
led the organization that planned and began the US exploration of
space: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Thomas O. Paine grew up an ordinary boy in northern California
during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He would go on to serve
as NASA's third administrator, leading the space agency through the
first historic missions that sent astronauts on voyages away from
Earth. On his watch, seven Apollo flights orbited our planet and
five reached our moon. From those missions came the first of twelve
men to walk on the moon. Years later, in 1985, the Reagan
administration would call on Paine again to chair the nation's
first-ever National Commission on Space. The Paine Commission
Report of 1986 challenged twenty-first-century America to "lead the
exploration and development of the space frontier, advancing
science, technology, and enterprise, and building institutions and
systems that make accessible vast new resources and support human
settlements beyond Earth orbit, from the highlands of the Moon to
the plains of Mars." In Piercing the Horizon, Sunny Tsiao
masterfully delivers new insights into the behind-the-scenes drama
of the space race. Tsiao examines how Paine's days as a World War
II submariner fighting in the Pacific shaped his vision for the
future of humankind in space. The book tells how Paine honed his
skills as a pioneering materials engineer at the fabled postwar
General Electric Company in the 1950s, to his dealings inside the
halls of NASA and with Johnson, Nixon, and later, the Reagan and
Bush administrations.As robotic missions begin leaving the earth,
Tsiao invites the reader to take another look at the plans that
Paine articulated regarding how America could have had humans on
Mars by the year 2000 as the first step to the exploration of deep
space. Piercing the Horizon provides provocative context to current
conversations on the case for reaching Mars, settling our solar
system, and continuing the exploration of space.
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