Featuring more than 600 photos, Photographing America's First Astronauts: Project Mercury Through the Lens of Bill Taub is the most complete photographic account of Project Mercury ever published. Previous Project Mercury books largely have relied on the relatively limited number of photos released by NASA. This book, however, showcases hundreds of never-before-seen images of America's first manned space program by NASA's first staff photographer, Bill Taub. Taub went everywhere with the Mercury astronauts, capturing their daily activities from 1959 to 1963. As a result, his photos provide a unique and intimate behind-the-scenes look at the people and operations of Project Mercury in real time.Drawing on Taub's recently discovered archive of thousands of black-and-white and color prints, slides, and transparencies, this is the first book to comprehensively visually document Project Mercury. No previous book has devoted as many images to each of the Mercury Seven astronauts and their pioneering spaceflights. Other chapters cover astronaut selection and training, NASA management, and facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Each image is accompanied by a detailed caption. The foreword is by legendary NASA Flight Director Eugene Kranz.

The race to space between the United States and the Soviet Union captured the popular imagination. On April 12, 1961, the USSR launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on a one-orbit flight, making him the first human in space. Three weeks later, American astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. flew 116 miles above Earth before splashing down in the Bahamas. Over the next twenty years astronauts emerged as national heroes. This book tells the story of the people and events of Projects Mercury and Gemini with hundreds of unpublished and rare photographs-both colour and black-and-white. Unlike other publications, which illustrate the space race with well-known and easily accessible images, this history draws from the authors' private library of over one hundred thousand (and growing) high-quality photos of the early U.S. manned-space program. Collected over a lifetime from public and private sources-including NASA archives, fellow collectors, retired NASA and news photographers, and auction houses-the images document American space missions of the Cold War era more comprehensively than ever before. Devoting a chapter to each flight, the authors also include detailed descriptions, providing new insight into one of America's greatest triumphs.

In this companion volume to John Bisney and J. L. Pickering's extraordinary book of rare photographs from the Mercury and Gemini missions, the authors now present the rest of the Golden Age of US manned space flight with a photographic history of Project Apollo. Beginning in 1967, Moonshots and Snapshots of Project Apollo chronicles the program's twelve missions and its two follow-ons, Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The authors draw from rarely seen NASA, industry, and news media images, taking readers to the Moon, on months-long odysseys above Earth, and finally on the first international manned space flight in 1975. The book pairs many previously unpublished images from Pickering's unmatched collection of Cold War-era space photographs with extended captions-identifying many NASA, military, and contract workers and participants for the first time-to provide comprehensive background information about the exciting climax and conclusion of the Space Race.