To Touch the Sky

About This Book

On the night of October 4, 1957, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball crossed the American sky, beeping in a language everyone understood: we are behind. Less than a year later a new civilian agency opened its doors, and within a single decade it had put twelve human beings on the surface of the Moon. This is the complete story of NASA and the exploration of space.

E.B Cohen begins in the panic of Sputnik and the rubble of Peenemünde, where the engineers who built Hitler's V-2 became the men who built the Saturn V. From the Mercury Seven strapped atop converted missiles, the narrative rises through Gemini's hard apprenticeship to the causeways of Apollo — the fire that killed three men on the pad, the Earthrise that changed how we see our planet, the seconds of fuel left as Armstrong searched for a place to land, and the lightning-in-a-bottle rescue of Apollo 13.

Then the story widens to the whole enterprise: the Space Shuttle and the two crews it killed, and the honest reckoning with why; the robots that became our emissaries — Viking on Mars, Voyager carrying a golden record into interstellar night, Cassini's plunge into Saturn, the little rover Opportunity that was built for ninety days and lasted fifteen years; the flawed mirror of Hubble and the spacewalkers who fixed it; the origami gold of the James Webb telescope unfolding a million miles from home; and the permanent human outpost circling the Earth sixteen times a day.

Cohen closes on the new space age — the pivot from a government monopoly to private rockets, the Dragon capsule that returned American launches to American soil, and the Artemis program that in April 2026 flew a crew around the Moon for the first time since 1972. Even-handed, vivid, and current, this is the definitive single-volume history of humanity's greatest adventure — and why we keep reaching for the sky.