To Touch the Sky

On the night of October 4, 1957, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball crossed the American sky, beeping in a language everyone understood: we are behind. Less than a year later a new civilian agency opened its doors, and within a single decade it had put twelve human beings on the surface of the Moon. This is the complete story of NASA and the exploration of space. E. B Cohen begins in the panic of Sputnik and the rubble of Peenemünde, where the engineers who built Hitler's V-2 became the men who built the Saturn V.
From the Mercury Seven strapped atop converted missiles, the narrative rises through Gemini's hard apprenticeship to the causeways of Apollo - the fire that killed three men on the pad, the Earthrise that changed how we see our planet, the seconds of fuel left as Armstrong searched for a place to land, and the lightning-in-a-bottle rescue of Apollo 13. Then the story widens to the whole enterprise: the Space Shuttle and the two crews it killed, and the honest reckoning with why; the robots that became our emissaries - Viking on Mars, Voyager carrying a golden record into interstellar night, Cassini's plunge into Saturn, the little rover Opportunity that was built for ninety days and lasted fifteen years; the flawed mirror of Hubble and the spacewalkers who fixed it; the origami gold of the James Webb telescope unfolding a million miles from home; and the permanent human outpost circling the Earth sixteen times a day.
Cohen closes on the new space age - the pivot from a government monopoly to private rockets, the Dragon capsule that returned American launches to American soil, and the Artemis program that in April 2026 flew a crew around the Moon for the first time since 1972. Even-handed, vivid, and current, this is the definitive single-volume history of humanity's greatest adventure - and why we keep reaching for the sky.