Pyle - Amazing Stories of the Space Age: True Tales of Nazis in Orbit, Soldiers on the Moon, Orphaned Martian Robots, and Other Fascinating Accounts From the Annals of Spaceflight

In my bedroom hangs a large oil painting that doesn't really belong there. It shows a shadowy, cylindrical spacecraft stealthily orbiting the Earth, about to dock with another mysterious space cylinder. The painting is from the early 1960s. I purchased it in an antiques store years ago, in a small town with major defense contractors nearby. The painting depicts what was once a highly secret US Air Force space project: the Manned Orbiting Laboratory or MOL. Very few illustrations of the MOL were ever made public. And the story behind the project, which has remained classified until recently, is fascinating. The air force once had secret plans to fly a space station of its own. Hardware was built and readied for launch, and astronauts were selected and trained for covert space missions. So what happened? You are about to read all about this and many other amazing stories of the space age in this wonderful book by Rod Pyle.

Amazing Stories of the Space Age is about the most mysterious and intriguing episodes of the history of space explorationits undercover projects, grandiose dreams, odd spinoffs, and muffled dramas. But rather than being tales of fiction or bogus conspiracy theories, the amazing stories presented here are all true, thoroughly researched, and expertly described. Rod Pyle has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything spaceI love all of his books about Mars explorationand his knowledge, enthusiasm, and humor shine through again in this book.

You are about to embark on a journey through time, all the way back to bygone eras of spaceflight, when spacecraft were still called rocketships and space stations would be shaped like wheels. The chapters convey the ominous angst of World War II and the Cold War, but also capture the boldness, optimism, and promise of the beginnings of spaceflight. You will read, with both wonder and nostalgia, accounts of the fantastical projects that were an integral, if not defining, part of the dawn of the space age. Each chapter is dedicated to a project, concept, or iconic product that, even if never fully realized, played an important role in shaping the history of space exploration and our relation to it. Pyle shows us that this history is not just the sum of what humans actually achieved in space, but also of what they never did or, maybe more accurately, haven't done yet.

While the amazing stories in this book have their specific context in history, many remain remarkably relevant, even timely. Take the moon base concepts of Project Horizon or the LUNEX Project, or Wernher von Braun's vision of inflatable space stations, or the advanced propulsion system of Project Orion. We should view these not so much as fields of failed dreams, but instead as the pioneering foundations of plausible developments about to be realized.

, which discusses von Braun's early plan to get humans to the red planet, is my favorite because it relates directly to my own life-long dream of seeing humans explore Mars. During our recent Northwest Passage Drive Expedition in the Arctic, my teammates and I drove the HMP Okariana souped-up Humvee fitted with tracks, standing in as a future pressurized rover for Marsacross several hundred kilometers of frozen polar desert before finally reaching the barren, rocky shores of Devon Island, aka Mars on Earth. As Pyle recounts in his book, von Braun had envisioned that the first humans on Mars would journey, in tracked vehicles, from one of Mars's snow-covered poles to its rocky equatorial regions. In a way, our Arctic trek was dj vu.

Illustrating Pyle's stories is an amazing collection of pictures and diagrams, some of them never published before. They are an integral part of what makes this book a real treasure.

Pascal Lee

Director, Mars Institute

Planetary Scientist, SETI Institute

NASA Ames Research Center

Moffett Field, California

September 2016

CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET IN NAZI GERMANY, DECLASSIFIED AFTER THE END OF WORLD WAR II

A scenario:

March 12, 1945, is a blustery day in Manhattan. Couples are strolling, enjoying the early spring weather. Earnest men dash across crowded boulevards; wool suits, ties, and fedoras are the uniform of the day. It is only 4:00 p.m., but the sidewalks are already shadowed canyons on Wall Street. The district is packed with those departing from work early, eager to begin the trek to the boroughs and home.

Most people are dashing to the subway, while others are engaged in animated conversation as they walk in pairs. The noises of urban life almost drown out the soft, twin pops that echo down the busy avenues, reverberating from the endless expanse of concrete and glass. A few look around, wondering what might have created the odd soundit was too deep to be a backfiring taxi; it sounded almost like distant artillery. Nobody thinks for a moment that it might signal a few tons of explosive death falling into dense air high above the metropolis. Far downrange, a machine from the future glides silently onward, seeking escape from the impending cataclysm.