Getting Smart About Space: A Reading List

Updated 7/24/19

This is a follow-up to my Monday post on advice to an English major interested in working in the space business. Learning the language is often more than half the battle when it comes to making the transition from liberal arts to science and engineering. If you aren’t as space focused as I am, you might at least review this list as a way to identify your own chosen industry’s “big books.” The more you know, the more you’ll be trusted by engineers and scientists to get their content right when you’re writing or editing for them. There are undoubtedly books I haven’t read yet–including some on these lists–or that I haven’t heard of yet, but there’s always something new to learn. Food for thought. 

To help the new reader, I’ve organized these books by subject matter, then alphabetically by author. I’ve highlighted in bold the ones I consider most important or just interesting. Full disclosure: I am an Amazon Associate, so in the vague event you buy any books from the links below, I will get some minor credit/pay for the referral. Enjoy!

Space History

Biographies/People

• Men from Earth, Buzz Aldrin
• Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Odyssey, Joseph P. Allen
• Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon, Colin Burgess & Kate Doolan
• Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, Bryan Burrough
• The Last Man on the Moon: Eugene Cernan and America’s Race to Space, Eugene Cernan
• A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, Andrew Chaikin
• Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age, David A. Clary
• Before Lift-Off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew, Henry S. F. Cooper
• Carrying the Fire and Flying to the Moon: An Astronaut’s Story, Michael Collins
• A Passion for Space: Adventures of a Pioneering Female NASA Flight Controller, Marianne J. Dyson
• An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything, Chris Hadfield
• First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, James R. Hansen
• Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon, James Hartford
• Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam
• Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin
• Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon, Nathalia Holt
• Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space, Chris Jones
• Apollo 13 (Also sold as Lost Moon), James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger
• Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, Scott Kelly
• Apollo: The Race to the Moon, Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox
• We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program, Richard Paul and Steven Moss
• Two Sides of the Moon: Ou Story of the Cold War Space Race, Dave Scott and Sergei Korolev
• Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space, Lynn Scherr
• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shatterly
• Managing Martians, Donna Shirley
• Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard, Neal Thompson
• They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus: An Incurable Dreamer Builds the First Civilian Spaceship, Elizabeth Weil
• The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, Frank White and Lawrence Tobias
• The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe

Programs/Launch Vehicles/Spacecraft

• Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles, Roger E. Bilstein
• Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age, Matthew Brzezinski
• Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, et al.
• Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, George Dyson
• The NASA Mission Reports (Series), Dyna-Soar: Hypersonic Strategic Weapons System, Robert Godwin
• Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to Apollo, Mike Gray
• Lunar Impact: The NASA History of Project Ranger, R. Cargill Hall and Paul Dickson
• Soyuz: A Universal Spacecraft, Rex D. Hall
• Architecture for Astronauts: An Activity Based Approach, Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger
• History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 1: The Space Shuttle Decision, 1965-1972, T. A. Heppenheimer
• International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems,  Steven J. Isakowitz
• Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module, Thomas J. Kelly
• Challenger: A Major Malfunction, Malcom McConnell
• The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, Michael Neufeld
• A Brief History of Rocketry in ISRO, P. V. Manoranjan Rao
• Space Travel: A History, Wernher von Braun and Fred Ordway III
• Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun, Bob Ward and John Glenn

Commercialization

• Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space, Michael Belfiore
• The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos, Christian Davenport
• Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight, Chris Dubbs and Emiline Paat Dahlstrom
• How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight, Julian Guthrie
• Space: The Free Market Frontier, Edward Hudgins
• No Bucks, No Buck Rogers: Creating the Business of Commercial Space, Derek Webber

Politics

• Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security and This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, William E. Burrows
• Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry, Andrew Butrica
• The Soviet Manned Space Program, Phillip Clark
• New Moon Rising: The Making of America’s New Space Vision and the Remaking of NASA, Keith Cowing, Frank Sietzen
• Mars Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Space Exploration Initiative, Thor Hogan
• Can Democracies Fly in Space? The Challenge of Revitalizing the U.S. Space Program, W. Kay
• …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Walter A. McDougall
• Space Politics and Policy: An Evolutionary Perspective, Eligar Sadeh

Science

• Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars, Erik M. Conway
• Space Telescopes: Capturing the Rays of the Electromagnetic Spectrum, Neil English
• Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft, Jay Gallentine
• Lunar Sourcebook: A User’s Guide to the Moon, Grant H. Heiken
• Beyond the Moon: A Golden Age of Planetary Explorations, 1971-1978, Robert S. Kraemer
• Cosmos, Carl Sagan
• Understanding Space: An Introduction to Astronautics, Jerry Jon Sellers
• Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet, Steve Squyres
• Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program 1976-2004, Peter J. Westwick

Space in the Future

These works differ from science fiction in that they are engineering or philosophical treatises (as opposed to stories) about technologies that could be built.

Destinations

• The Lunar Base Handbook, Peter Eckart
• The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet, Ed. Joel. S. Levine
• Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets and Rain of Iron and Ice, John S. Lewis
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach
• Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space, Harrison Schmitt
• Islands in the Sky: Bold New Ideas for Colonizing Space, Stanley Schmidt, Robert Zubrin
• The Value of the Moon: How to Explore, Live, and Prosper Using the Moon’s Resources and The Once and Future Moon, Paul Spudis
• Moonrush: Improving Life on Earth with the Moon’s Resources, Dennis Wingo
• The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet, Mars Direct, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, Robert Zubrin

Spacecraft & Technologies

• Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, James Benford
• The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System, Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling
• Solar Power Satellites: A Space Energy System for Earth, Peter E. Glaser and Frank P. Davidson
• Space Architecture Education for Engineers and Architects: Designing and Planning Beyond Earth, Sandra Hauplik-Meusburger
• Out of This World: The New Field of Space Architecture, A. Scott Howe and Brent Sherwood
• Paradise Regained: The Regreening of Earth, Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel, Living Off the Land in Space: Green Roads to the Cosmos, Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth, Les Johnson (some with other authors)
• Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, K. F. Long
• The Starflight Handbook, Eugene F. Mallove and Gregory L. Matloff
• The Case for Space Solar Power, John C. Mankins
• Playgrounds of the Mind and N-Space, Larry Niven
• The High Frontier, Gerard K. O’Neill
• Far Frontiers, The Endless Frontier, The Endless Frontier Vol. II, and A Step Farther Out, Jerry Pournelle

Science Fiction

Okay, these aren’t nonfiction, but they had a great impact on many people working in (or running) NASA and commercial space organizations, so it’s worth taking the time to know what myths, stories, or paradigms people in the field draw upon in their work.

• The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
• The Fountains of Paradise and The Songs of Distant Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
• The Past Through Tomorrow, Juvenile Series, Orphans of the Sky, Methuselah’s Children, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
• Ringworld, Larry Niven
• Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
• Contact, Carl Sagan
• The Mars Project, Wernher von Braun

Thanks to Ryan Faith, Hal Fulton, Bill Kahle, Neil Shuttlewood, Melissa Snider, and Michael Verhulst for their contributions. A very special thank-you to Cliff McMurray, who gave me my initial reading list at my first International Space Development Conference in 1997 and has added to it since then.