posted 08-31-2023 09:50 AM               

Rather than a nuts and bolts book on spacesuits and hardware, this story details the human experience of "walking" and working in open space. Much like our first book Come Fly With Us, this is a story about the people — those who have had the opportunity of a lifetime to conduct an EVA, and those who trained them, designed the hardware, and planned the missions. Our ultimate goal with the story was to put YOU in the spacesuit, and participate vicariously in the ultimate experience of walking in space.

In the course of writing this book, we had the opportunity to interview nearly 20 astronauts spanning the Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle, Shuttle/Mir, and ISS programs, and a number of trainers and managers who prepared them for EVA. Of course, you will find a wealth of early NASA internal documents sprinkled with insightful comments from some familiar names. We also present rare material related to the early Soviet EVA efforts as well.

posted 09-30-2024 10:59 AM               

To say this book has been challenging is an understatement. We started brainstorming this at Spacefest X in 2019. We could have never guessed what lay ahead in terms of the number of interviews, limitations imposed during the pandemic, and the challenge of covering such a long period of space history (60 years!) in one book.

But the final result is something we are both quite proud of. We set out, as we did in "Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program," to tell a story of the people involved, and in this case, the experience of conducting a spacewalk from a first-person perspective. We endeavored to "put the reader in the spacesuit," while at the same time sharing a high-level history of the procedures, equipment, and training required to exit a spacecraft and do useful work. With dozens of interviews of the astronauts, engineers, managers, and trainers, and a mountain of internal documents culled from NASA's archives, this book captures the thrill, hardship, danger, and lifelong reward of participating in EVA from many different perspectives.

We'll keep everyone updated as we approach our publication date.