Piloted Space Flights

From suborbital flights and space walks to the space shuttle and joint missions to Mars and beyond: What are the advantages and disadvantages of piloted spaceflight? Do we really need them? Are they worth the risk? What lies ahead? Isaac Asimov addresses these and other questions in this look at the specialized equipment, tasks, and personnel that put people in outer space.

This book bears a more accurate title than its relative, The World’s Space Programs: it really is a history of piloted space flights, and it does a good job of it on the whole. It doesn’t give a mission-by-mission summary and is rather sketchy, so adults may not find it all that terribly interesting, but it would be a good place for a child to go to get an overall sense of our history in space through 1990.