Thank you Netgalley and Chronicle Books for this arc.

Exactly what the title promises but with a little bit more. Bill Nye leads with a great intro to modern space exploration. Then comes the dazzling images which include both photos and artist renderings (for the stuff that hasn’t been launched yet or for which there was no way to get an actual photo). The pictures are fantastic and the information snippets are accessible for (I’d guess roughly) middle school and above. B

Just lovely. Amazing NASA photos accompanied by succinct and yet informative text annotations that give context and background, plus a preface by Bill Nye — what’s not to love here?

When I think NASA, my brain automatically goes to Apollo Program and Space Shuttle and Hubble and James Webb telescopes, but this book covers way more than just that. We have put quite a few things in space and in orbit. There are communication and weather satellites, launch vehicles, lunar and Mars rovers, Skylab and ISS, Voyager and Cassini and Juno space probes — you name it, and NASA probably has sent it off the surface of our planet.

As the introduction to this book reminds a starry-eyes reader like yours truly, it’s not all just rockets. Rocket is not quite a spacecraft but the way to get one off the surface of Earth. And once we get there, we have flyby spacecraft, orbiter spacecraft, atmospheric spacecraft, lander spacecraft, penetrator spacecraft, observatory spacecraft, low-Earth-orbit spacecraft. And there are photos of all those in action, and it’s pretty fascinating, seeing what we Earth monkeys are capable of doing with our primate brains and a bit of science.

Did you know that the 8-track tape recorders on the Voyager probe are still working? Fascinating indeed.

5 stars. Gorgeous and informative.
(Oh, and space is awesome).

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Thanks to NetGalley and Chronicle Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A lot of photos that I have never seen before. The photographs include captions with good descriptions of what the photo is about, be it a satellite, rockets, shuttles and the International Space Station (ISS). Most of the photos had copyright markers which were very distracting. I hope they have been removed for the hardcover book.

This ebook was an ARC provided by NetGallery.

As someone who spent their elementary years living across from the launch pads at Cape Canaveral, I have always been a huge fan of space and space travel. I remember how we would wake for early morning launches because you’d be waken up anyway from the shaking of the house. I remember being a Girl Scout sleeping under the Saturn V. This has remained an area of interest into my adulthood.

My son shares this passion, having attended Space Camp. We’ve also been to all the space museums on the east coast and seen all but one of the remaining space shuttles. We love space.

This book was wonderful with its high quality images, but also the short descriptions that were accessible to me as an adult, but also to a middle schooler.

My only area of improvement would be to start with when a photo is an artist rendering, just so it is clear upfront. This wasn’t an issue for me, but I know people will not always read the whole paragraph.

Overall, made me as excited as anything space does. Looking forward to the continued exploration with Artemis.

The preface with Bill Nye is a great opening. The photographs are exquisite and the information is invaluable.
My child and I loved reading this together, and we will spend more time exploring it over and over the rest of the summer.

The subtitle of the book says it all - this is largely a photographic survey of NASA rockets and spacecraft. Many of the photos appear to have not been included in prior works. Some text provides context to the photos.

An outstanding tribute to humanity's exploration of space: The pictures of spacecraft, equipment, moons, and planets are stunning and dramatic, (And the cubesat deployment pic on page 119 was downright cute!) "Spacecraft and Rockets - Photographs from the Archives of NASA" starts with an engaging intro from Bill Nye Science Guy, and goes on to share a highly informative and fascinating narrative written by Nirmala Natara. (I had no idea that there are still working 8-track tape recorders on the Voyager spacecraft launched nearly 50 years ago!)

If you like NASA, spacecraft, space exploration, science, or even just cool pictures then you will enjoy this book!

I thank the publisher and creators of this excellent work for sharing a temporary electronic review copy of this work.

Incredible pictures with interesting descriptions. Great for anyone with an interest in space or STEM.

The photography is epic, and the narrative by Bill Nye is an unexpected treat. It was a book exactly like this one, published by NASA in the seventies and give to me by and uncle who was a NASA engineer, that got me hooked on space and space travel for life. I watched every Apollo mission live, from takeoff to splashdown. This is exactly the kind of book that will hook many more generations of kids to science and space. And even if that weren’t true, the photography is breathtaking. Because space is breathtaking.