The Right Stuff - BookTrib

3 Movies and a Book for Space Exploration Day: Celebrating the Final Frontier

Published on July 18, 2015 in Fiction by Michael Ruscoe

Monday, July 20, is Space Exploration Day, the 46th anniversary of what might be the greatest scientific triumph in the history of humankind: landing a man on the surface of the moon. It’s an accomplishment that’s the pinnacle of human achievement in many ways. It represented a near-unimaginable technological feat: for example, the computers on the spacecraft that brought Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon and back were nowhere near as powerful as the average cell phone that we carry around with us today. It was a zenith of human exploration, certainly on par with the early Vikings and Christopher Columbus voyaging across the Atlantic and discovering the New World. Perhaps most importantly, though, it was…

Keep Reading

The Wife Stuff: The Astronaut Wives Club blasts off on ABC

Published on June 16, 2015 in Fiction by Michael Ruscoe

Which would be more difficult for you: flinging yourself into an unknown frontier on a mission fraught with danger from which you may not come back alive—or sitting by helplessly and watching a loved one do it, able to do nothing but pray for their safe return? For the wives of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, who sat in living rooms and gathered around televisions as their husbands launched the early days of the American space program, this became a kind of pressure few of us can imagine. And these women withstood it under remarkable public scrutiny that saw them transform from regular military spouses to American royalty in the nascent days of television news coverage. Now, their story will…

Keep Reading