Download Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight AudioBook Free
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Award, a amazing elegy to the waning times of individual spaceflight as we've known it. In the 1960s humans got their first steps from Globe - and for a while our prospects in space felt endless. However in a period of austerity, and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that goal has ended. In early 2011, Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's previous three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the finish of a time. With Dean as our guide to Florida's Space Seacoast and to the history of NASA, Departing Orbit will take the measure of what American spaceflight has achieved while reckoning with its prior witnesses, such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Oriana Fallaci. On the way Dean complies with NASA workers, astronauts, and space enthusiasts, gathering possible answers to the question: Exactly what does it mean that a spacefaring region won't be going to space any more? Cover image courtesy of NASA.
