Table of Contents

*Featuring interviews and insight from astronauts who have flown on Apollo, Soyuz, Shuttle and ISS missions.*Beginnings - the origins of the word 'astronaut', and astronauts in science fiction, literature and poetry.*Selection and recruitment - previous astronaut intakes, types of astronaut jobs, interviews, tests and selection/rejection, NASA's 45-page application form.*Astronaut missions - sub-orbital, Earth orbit, rendezvous and docking, ISS, lunar orbit, Moon landing, driving on the Moon, future missions, Mars.*Space suits - purpose, design, components, evolution, potential dangers.*The astronaut's equipment - spacewalk equipment, equipment operated from inside the spacecraft, personal equipment.*Training for Earth orbit - training for weightlessness, spacewalk training, airlock, mission simulation, training for emergencies.*Training for beyond Earth - landing on the Moon, driving the Lunar Rover, asteroid capture, geology fieldwork training, one-sixth gravity mobility training, Mars mission simulations.*The experience of space - arriving in space, views from space, The Earth, Moon rise, the stars, the Earth at night, the aurora borealis, daily life in orbit, the effects of weightlessness.*Working in orbit - experiments, repairs, astronomy, breakdowns.*Personal time in space - leisure, exercise, photography, communications. * Epilogue - returning to Earth. * Appendices - astronauts' accomplishments, glossary/abbreviations.

About the Author

Dr Ken MacTaggart is Co-Editor (with David Woods) of the Apollo 11 Flight Journal, NASA’s official record of the mission, with accompanying technical commentary. He is also a long -standing contributor to NASA’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. He has written for national newspapers and magazines about many space topics, including Apollo, the Space Shuttle, the MMU, Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 13 accident, the Russian Interkosmos programme, etc. He lives in Inverness, Scotland