This gorgeous book on NASA's glory days will inspire the astronaut in all of us
"The NASA Archives: 60 Years in Space" by Piers Bizony, Andrew Chaikin and Roger Launius; Taschen (468 pages, $150)
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Jules Verne's space dreams began with a gun. A big one. In his 1865 sci-fi novel "From the Earth to the Moon," Verne spins a yarn about the Baltimore Gun Club, a weapons society that built a massive cannon - the Columbiad space gun - which would launch three people, including a French poet, in a lunar-ward projectile. When America first landed its men on the moon a little over a century later, the idea was essentially the same, scratch the poet.
