Aiming for the Stars; The Dreamers and Doers of the Space Age

Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, [2], 338 pages. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Tom D. Crouch (born February 28, 1944) is an American aeronautics historian and curator. Crouch was born in Dayton, Ohio. Crouch attended Ohio University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1966. He also attended Miami University and received a Master of Arts degree in history there in 1968. He later earned a Ph.D. in history from the Ohio State University in 1976. In 2001 the Wright State University awarded him with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. An employee of the Ohio Historical Society, 1968-1974, Crouch planned the exhibits for the Neil Armstrong Museum, and the history exhibitions for the Ohio Historical Center. He accepted a curatorial position with the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in 1974, and prepared exhibitions for the opening of that building in 1976. He was named Chairman of the Aeronautics Department of the NASM in 1990, and in 1999 was named Senior Curator, Aeronautics. Crouch was appointed by then President William J. Clinton to chair the federal advisory board planning activities commemorating the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright in 2003. He also participated in and worked to resolve the issues over the Enola Gay bomber being displayed at the National Air and Space Museum. Crouch is the author of some fifteen books and many articles, primarily on topics related to the history of flight technology. Aiming for the Stars explores the motivations, goals, trials, and triumphs of the people who pioneered space exploration from the sixteenth century to the modern era. Tom D. Crouch describes space travel's emergence from the pages of science fiction into the laboratories of twentieth-century rocketeers such as Wernher von Braun, who masterminded Nazi rocket development and later became a key figure in the U.S. space program, and Sergei Korolev, an engineer whose successful launches became the foundation of Soviet Cold War policy. The book also explains the goals and missions of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs and describes the 1986 Challenge disaster, the spacefaring adventures of astronaut Shannon Lucid, and the fortunes of the Mir space station in the wake of glasnost. Linking individual obsessions and achievements with the political events and social currents that surrounded them, the book offers a wide-ranging view of the attempt to explore the final frontier.