Given its youth as a sphere of human endeavour – and it seems incredible that Yuri Gagarin first observed, “Planet Earth is blue” ony 46 years ago – space exploration has amassed a voluminous history. Still, those pages are full enough of incident, character, brilliance, and folly, to justify their number.

Like so much cutting-edge technology, space craft had their roots in war; more specifically rocket technology developed in the Second World War. Deborah Cadbury’s Space Race chronicles the first, tentative steps into space by the USSR and USA, amid rampant Cold War tension.

Tom Wolfe covers similar ground in his seminal The Right Stuff, about the lives – and remarkable courage – of the first US test pilots sent into space. The tiny Mercury ³spacecraft that carried them up to an altitude of 180 miles was only 1.7 cu m in volume.

The subsequent Apollo missions have burned themselves on the popular consciousness. Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaiken, is full of riveting first-hand testimony from the men who made the 360,000-mile journey. For sheer drama, though, turn to a man who never made it to the Moon. Apollo 13: Lost Moon is by Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated ship crippled by an explosion.

A new era in space travel arrived with the Space Shuttle. But the programme has been bedevilled by tragedy and, critics say, poor management. The Challenger Launch Decision, by Diane Vaughan, locates the roots of the 1986 disaster when Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch – in Nasa’s organisational culture.

Now the age of private space tourism is almost upon us. Destination Space, by Kenny Kemp, is the Virgin Group’s brochure for the rides they will soon be offering to the public as Virgin Galactic on SpaceShipTwo. The cost of a ticket? A mere $200,000 (£100,000).

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