Late on the night of May 16, 1943, Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron of the Royal Air Force on a mission code-named Operation Chastise--an audacious bombing raid across the English Channel. Their aim? Destroy three dams in the Ruhr Valley, the industrial heartland of Germany. The dams were fiercely protected. Torpedo nets in the water ......

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 20th centurys greatest flight achievement, this book chronicles how 400,000 men and women across the US worked to transport human beings across a quarter million miles of hostile space to an unexplored world, and how they ensured that the seven million engineered parts invented to fly this single mission ......

ESCAPE FROM EARTH is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the, as he called it, problem of escape from the Earth by rocket. Its a wild ride. Jack ......