Download or read book The Complete Idiot's Guide to NASA written by Thomas D. Jones and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coverage includes: the history of NASA, from its origins in the l950s as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Projects Mercury and Gemini; the history and timeline, triumphs and tragedies of the famed Apollo missions, including the historic Apollo 11, which put the first men on the Moon in l969; NASA's contributions to our everyday life, most notably on robotics and the creation of cutting-edge research on aerodynamics and chapters on important NASA discoveries: the Pioneer and Voyager Spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope, communications satellites such as the Echo, Telstar, and Syncom.