Product Description: In her heartwarming and empowering memoir, space pioneer Anousheh Ansari tells the story of her childhood in Iran and her family's exodus to America after the Islamic Revolution.  After settling down in Texas, Anousheh built a computer technology firm from the ground up, which eventually realized a net worth of $750 million and ultimately allowed her to achieve her childhood dream of spaceflight...read more

Product Description: On June 17, 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. Curiously, unlike every previous milestone in the "space race," this event did not spur NASA to catch up by flying an American woman. Though there were suitable candidates-two years earlier, thirteen female pilots recruited by the private Woman in Space program had passed a strenuous physical exam and were ready for another stage of astronaut testing-American women would not escape earth's gravity for another twenty years...read more

A female world-record-setting pilot, Jerrie Cobb was recruited in 1959 to take the astronaut tests. She excelled, so the doctor who supervised the selection of NASA's Mercury astronauts recruited additional female pilots. Twelve performed exceptionally. Stephanie Nolen tracked down eleven of the surviving 'Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees'' and learned the story of those early days of the space race and the disappointment when, in 1961, the women were grounded.

Product Description: In 1961, Martha Ackmann and twelve other remarkable women secretly tested and passed the same battery of tests as the Mercury 7 astronauts, but were summarily dismissed at NASA and on Capitol Hill.

Tells the dramatic, uplifting story of two generations of female flyers who surpassed their male counterparts in courage and often in skill, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots of World War II and the aerospace test pilots of the early 1960s. Reprint. (view table of contents)