"Aiming for the Stars explores the motivations, goals, trials, and triumphs of the people who pioneered "the fearful void" of space. Tracing the idea of space exploration to the sixteenth century, Tom D. Crouch describes its emergence from the pages of science fiction into the laboratories of early twentieth-century American, Russian, and German rocketeers. He charts the parallel careers of Wernher von Braun, who masterminded Nazi rocket development and later became a key figure in the U.S. space program, and Sergei Korolev, an engineer whose successful launches became the foundation of Soviet Cold War policy. Explaining the goals and missions of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the book also describes the 1986 Challenger disaster, the spacefaring adventures of astronaut Shannon Lucid, and the fortunes of the Mir space station in the wake of glasnost."--Jacket.