Much of what has been written on the topic of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) tracking and data networks has been on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network, the DSN. This is perhaps understandable as the DSN has played and continues to play a central role in many of America's most high-profile exploration missions. These have included the early Pioneer probes, the Mariner missions of the 1960s and 1970s, Viking and Voyager, and most recently, Galileo, Cassini- Huygens, and the new generation of Mars explorers that will prepare the way for eventual human voyages to the Red Planet.

The NASA History Program was first established in 1959 (a year after NASA itself was formed) and has continued to document and preserve the agency's remarkable history through a variety of products. The NASA History Division serves two key functions: fulfilling the mandate of the 1958 "Space Act" calling for NASA to disseminate aerospace information as widely as possible, and helping NASA managers understand and thus benefit from the study of past accomplishment and difficulties. NASA publishes documents on topics such as: Documentary History, Memoirs, Aeronautics and Space Report of the President, and many more. This is one of those documents.

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.