space

One of the Golden Busy People Book series published in 1968 for children, this volume shows what an astronaut experiences in training, testing, and the launch and recovery process. As expected with this type of book, it has been well-used and needs some preservation care. Unlike most Golden Book publications, this book measures 16 inches tall and 6½ inches wide. 

Published in 2005, this work celebrates 50 years of space exploration, from its Cold War beginnings of satellites and manned missions into space, to orbiting space stations and unmanned exploratory missions to other planets in our solar system. Published by Smithsonian Books, this beautifully illustrated work features histories from participants in both the Soviet Union and the United States space programs. It was written by science journalist and space historian Piers Bizony, with a foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

One of the titles from the popular Golden Book children’s series, this book covers the space shuttle era and some history of space travel. It includes photographs and illustrations of what space and planetary exploration might be like in the future. Written for “junior space enthusiasts,” it is an example of the breadth of material on aviation and space flight written for a popular audience contained in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Library. 

This is one of over 1,600 titles at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library classified as a pop-up and movable book. Some of these titles have been in the collection since the founding of the Cooper Union Museum in 1897. However, the majority of the pop-up collection was acquired in the 1980s and continues to grow through donations from collectors and select purchases. Spanning over 500 years, these action-packed works of art were intended to calculate, educate, entertain, and amaze. This book is a particularly rare example on astronomy published in the USSR in 1982.

Black Stars in Orbit is an overview of the first African Americans who were selected to be astronaut candidates, the first who worked for NASA on new technologies for mission projects, and the first to travel to space as part of the NASA Space Shuttle program. This volume is beatifully illustrated and contains brief biographical overviews.

This copy of one of Jules Verne’s most celebrated adventure tales has an elusive past. With no publication date, an annotation on its inside cover dated ‘1925,’ and a blind stamp minted 1932 on the title page from the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, this book presents just as much wonder itself as the story it features. The Smithsonian Libraries Research Annex (SLRA) discovered that this copy of Verne’s work, among others, had been released by Chicago-based publisher M.A. Donohue in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

Harvey Harlow Nininger is considered to be the father of meteoritics. He worked tirelessly to convince the scientific community that meteorites were far more common on Earth than previously thought and a valuable source of information about the solar system and the Earth’s geologic past.

“Writers of mystery stories often have to cast about for the key elements of an intriguing story […] I did not go looking for these critical ingredients of the story of the Tucson Meteorite. They came to me.” states Richard R. Willey in his forward to this short but thorough book. This book explores every aspect of the Meteorites – from their original descent to Earth, their mineral composition, to their use as anvils by American Indians and frontiersmen alike, to their name as a specimen, and the history of how they came to be in the Smithsonian.