non-fiction accounts of NASA, rocketry, aviation, and the space age
created by thelivingautomaton
last updated April, 2026
Space Shuttle Stories: Firsthand Astronaut Accounts from All 135 Missions
Tom Jones
Starman: The Truth Behind The Legend Of Yuri Gagarin
Piers Bizony
Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
Rowland White
Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew
Michael D. Leinbach
Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles
Roger E. Bilstein
Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet
Brian Shul
Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto
Alan Stern
How Apollo Flew to the Moon
W. David Woods
Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut's Journey to the Moon
Al Worden
Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965–1992 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)
Rick Houston
Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race
David Randolph Scott
The Astronaut Wives Club
Lily Koppel
We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves
Scott Carpenter
First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong
James R. Hansen
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
Michael J. Neufeld
Moon Dust - In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth
Andrew Smith
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon
Alan Shepard
Apollo: The Race To The Moon
Charles Murray
Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974
Asif A. Siddiqi
Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11
James Donovan
Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon
James Harford
American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
Douglas Brinkley
Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age
Matthew Brzezinski
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Mary Roach
Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants
John Drury Clark
The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel
Meredith Bagby
The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)
Richard Jurek
Flight: My Life in Mission Control
Christopher Kraft
Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir
Bryan Burrough
Cosmos
Carl Sagan
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