Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space

Never before has such an ambitious series of talks, articles, and recollections been assembled to celebrate the human exploration of space. It is the result of the unique Starmus meeting in 2011 on Tenerife, where the legendary Russian and American pioneers of the space age met up for the first time to share the moments that electrified the human race. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Yuri Baturin, Charlie Duke, Victor Gorbatko, Alexei Leonov, Jim Lovell, Claude Nicollier, and Sergei Zhukov tell their personal stories about the first space walk, the lunar landing, the heroic recovery of Apollo 13, the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more. Our discovery of the Universe, our place within it, and the meaning of life on Earth also forged dramatic moments at Starmus through the presentations of some of the world's leading scientists and thinkers such as Rich Goldman, Brian May, Jack Szostak, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Joseph Silk, George Smoot, Michel Mayor, Robert Williams, Adam Burrows, Garik Israelian, Kip Thorne, Sami Solanki and Leslie Sage.

This volume was originally conceived to mark 50 years since Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight, but is now equally dedicated to one of our greatest heroes in human history -- Neil Armstrong, who passed away in 2012.

With an introduction by renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space celebrates the critical human moment we have lived -- the first steps into outer space, the explosion of knowledge about our cosmos, and where it might all be taking us. It will become one of the seminal books of our era.