What you will learn in The History of Space Exploration

1. 1. Before rockets

   The arithmetic that decides what can reach orbit was finished in 1903, twenty-three years before anything flew on liquid fuel and fifty-four before anything reached orbit at all.

2. 2. The space race

   Sputnik on 4 October 1957, Gagarin on 12 April 1961, Apollo 11 in 1969. The order is the point: Apollo was the answer to having come second, not the opening move.

3. 3. The robots went first

   Every place a person has been, a machine reached first — and most of the places machines have reached, no person will. Two of them are still transmitting after forty-eight years.

4. 4. What went wrong

   Seven failures on one axis, in the same schema and with the same care as the successes. Each of them changed something, and three of them were argued about in writing beforehand.

5. 5. The commercial era

   A nine-year gap in which the United States could not launch a person, and what filled it — plus the first landing of an orbital-class booster, which changed the cost of spaceflight without changing any of its physics.

6. 6. What is planned

   The shaded band on the right of the axis has not happened. Every event in it carries the date its plan was announced, because a target is a statement about somebody's intention and not about the future.