Spaceshots & Snapshots of Projects Mercury & Gemini

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. 1st edition. Very Nice Copy. quarto. laminated boards x + 435pp., colour & b/w plates, text ills., appends., bibliog., index, On April 12, 1961, the USSR launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on a one-orbit flight, making him the first human in space. 3 weeks later, American astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. flew 116 miles above Earth before splashing down in the Bahamas. Over the next 20 years astronauts emerged as national heroes. The story of the people & events of Projects Mercury and Gemini with hundreds of unpublished and rare photographs; both colour and black-and-white. Unlike other publications, which illustrate the space race with well-known and easily accessible images, this history draws from the authors private library of over 100,000 (and growing) high-quality photos of the early U.S. manned-space program