Bøker av Robert Godwin

In the first two months of 1958 President Eisenhower ordered the creation of a new department at the Pentagon, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. One of the first tasks appointed to ARPA was to choose which branch of the military would handle the countrys space program. Almost arbitrarily ARPA chose the Air Force. This decision stood for just a few months before the President announced the formation of NASA, but it became clear to the heads of the U.S. Army that they were running second in a two-horse race. The Pentagon would only be allowed into space if they could persuade the President that there was a military need to be there. Almost immediately the Air Force and the Army produced their rival visions for operating off-world. The Army team led by Generals Medaris and Trudeau turned to Wernher von Braun whose team presented a long-term plan based around their new one-million pound rocket the Juno V; but the Air Force went all-out and showed its plans for strategic domination by building a moon base. In March 1959 the Army responded with its own vision for a moon base which they called Project Horizon. The plan was conceived and presented to the President in June 1959 and was immediately recognised as a useful beginning for a civilian moon base, and so the report was reduced from 800 pages to 400 pages and given to NASA. Now, exactly sixty years later, three of the four volumes of the original military report are available here. Volume III still remains classified as SECRET. Reproduced from the actual copy of Horizon which was used to create the edited Civilian version. This version includes the original colour graphics. Bonus: In 1966 the Army was still working on its plans for space combat and some of those plans are included here as a bonus to Project Horizon.

On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, inaugurating the Space Age. To the general public and many politicians in the West the small satellite racing overhead was a shocking and frightening display of communist technological advance. But in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the headquarters of the United States'' Air Force, work had been underway since the end of World War II on the inevitability of space flight. The shock of Sputnik created an opportunity to bring this work into the light of day. During the 12 months between October 1957 and September 1958 engineers, doctors and a host of Air Force Colonels and Generals began a concerted effort to persuade President Eisenhower to allow them to take control of the United States'' future space efforts, and to place humans into space no later than 1960 and then send them to the surface of the moon by 1964. In February 1958, without going through the usual gauntlet of hearings the Air Force brass were informed that they were in charge of the country''s space program. Emboldened by this unexpected surprise a team of more than 60 Air Force staff quickly put together a long-range plan for the exploration of space. This new plan included the evolution of Air Force missiles from the Thor, through the Titan, to the Super-Titan and ultimately to the 2,200,000 lb thrust "Big B" booster. The proposed spacecraft carried acronym names like MISS, MISSOPH, LUREC and finally LUMAN, for the manned lunar lander. This book includes the official Air Force history of these events, for many years classified as "SECRET". It explains how many of these ideas ended up being adopted by NASA and led to the Space Race of the 1960s. Included with this book is a CD-ROM featuring documents from the early USAF plans for a moon landing.

Even fifty years later there are still important stories waiting to be told about how humans first walked on another world; such as the one in this book. Take a trip back to the 1950s when the Chance Vought Company, builders of some of America''s top fighter aircraft, were quietly figuring out how to get men to the moon using something they called Project MALLAR. It is the story of a team of engineers who built some of the most sophisticated space simulators in the world, where almost all of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts learned the art of spaceflight. This same team produced the first serious plan to use modular spacecraft and a technique called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous to make it possible to get to the moon. This book also reveals how for several years rocket genius Wernher von Braun overlooked his own ideas, before having them reintroduced back to him because of Project MALLAR, and how Vought''s fighter aircraft weaved in and out of the Apollo story and then contributed to almost every major airliner in the sky today. Included are rare illustrations, some from recently declassified reports, of the earliest designs for the rockets and spacecraft that led to the greatest technological achievement in human history. In Manned Lunar Landing And Return, Robert Godwin takes the reader back to the time long before President Kennedy made his famous proclamation to reach for the moon and reveals one critical thread in the trail of genius which ended in the Sea of Traquility.

In 2015 author Robert Godwin revealed the story of William Leitch an almost unknown Scottish/Canadian scientist who in 1861 suggested that rockets could be used for spaceflight because they obeyed Newtonian principles. In William Leitch Presbyterian Scientist and the Concept of Rocket Spaceflight 1854-64 Godwin reveals the life of this brilliant mind from the early Victorian era. In September 1861 Leitch wrote an essay called "A Journey Through Space" in which he proposed the idea that a rocket would be the most efficient way to travel outside the Earth's atmosphere. His idea would be forgotten and not be "rediscovered" for another three decades. Beginning from Leitch's humble birth on the Isle of Bute in western Scotland, this book takes you through his education alongside William Thomson, later the most famous scientist of the 19th century, through his many scientific lectures on everything from the mysteries of electricity to the viability of alien life on other planets, before concluding in Kingston Ontario where he struggled to convince Canada's first Prime Minister to try and establish a fair educational system for all Canadians. In this greatly expanded second edition Godwin dissects more than three dozen newly discovered essays by William Leitch in which he discusses some of the profound mysteries of all time. Babbage and his "analytical engine" and the significance of artificial intelligence; the special relationship between light and time and a connection to Albert Einstein; the need for a grand unifying theory to explain the universe; a remote possibility of a connection to Robert Goddard and a very definite connection to the flight of Apollo 11. The story of William Leitch shatters many modern preconceptions about the fragile truce between science and religion in the early 19th century and adds a new wrinkle in the history of space flight.

Space junkies and armchair astronauts are provided with comprehensive, handy references for a variety of space-related missions, vehicles, and concepts in this pocket-sized series. Compiled with the cooperation of NASA, each topic-specific reference features relevant statistics, photographs, and the stories behind each project. Books on manned missions include crew photographs, information on patches and equipment, and flight statistics such as time in space, distance traveled, and mission objectives. Photographs and statistics for launch vehicles, orbiters, probes, and experimental equipment are featured in each equipment-specific reference. Flight data and images for all of the unmanned deep space probes, including Cassini, Deep Space One, Galileo, Huygens, NEAR, Pioneer 10 and 11, Stardust, and Voyager 1 and 2, are featured in this examination of astronomers' attempts to understand the outer reaches of the universe.

If you always thought that it was Giovanni Schiaparelli who first coined the phrase ''Canali'' pertaining to the straight lines he appeared to observe on Mars you''d be wrong. In 1858 an astronomer working at the Vatican observatory named father Pietro Angelo Secchi took it upon himself to create his own drawings of Mars. The red planet was now nearing a close approach to earth and the powerful Vatican telescope was capable of resolving detail previously invisible to most astronomers. Secchi thought he saw a series of straight lines on the Martian surface so he made an innocuous notation in his notes. His sketches and articles were published in 1859 in which he referred several times to ''Canale Atlantico'' or ''Canale Ceruleo''. His regrettable choice of words would not have an impact for another eight years. This volume tells not only of people and places that have influenced mankind''s relationship with the enigmatic red planet, but it also shows you the colour drawings that Secchi made, which were provided to us directly by the Vatican itself. Along with many other interesting stories, drawings and photographs this book will be a prize for both the novice or ardent student of Mars.