📚 Astronautics

The engineering of leaving: orbital mechanics made practical, and the test pilots’ literature that carried it.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject astronautics in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Right Stuff	Tom Wolfe	1973	41
	The Exploration of Space	Arthur C. Clarke	1951	23
	Space Exploration (DK Eyewitness Books)	Carole Stott	1995	19
	History of rocketry & space travel	Wernher von Braun	1966	16
	An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth	Chris Hadfield	2013	15
	Rakety i li︠u︡di	B. E. Chertok	1995	14
	Life in space	Katie Daynes	2002	13
	Spacecraft systems engineering	John Stark	2003	13
	Man and Space	Arthur C. Clarke	1964	12
	Entering space	Joseph P. Allen	1984	11
	The astronaut wives club	Lily Koppel	2013	10
	ABC's of space	Isaac Asimov	1969	8
	Failure is not an option	Gene Kranz	1999	8
	Space	Sue Becklake	1988	7
	Understanding Space	William J. Astore	2000	7
	If I were an astronaut	Eric Braun	2009	7
	Astronaut Selection Test Book	Tim Peake	2018	7
	Beyond	Stephen Walker	2021	7
	The dictionary of space technology	Joseph A. Angelo	1982	6
	Women in Space	Karen Bush Gibson	2014	6
	Frontiers of space	Philip Bono	1969	5
	The Heavens and the Earth	Walter A. McDougall	1985	5
	How do you go to the bathroom in space?	William R. Pogue	1985	4
	Flight in America	Roger E. Bilstein	1987	4
	The Life of an Astronaut (Eye on the Universe)	Niki Walker	2000	4
	The Secret of Apollo	Stephen B. Johnson	2002	4
	The Russian space bluff	Leonid Vladimirov	1971	3
	Space Race	Deborah Cadbury	2006	3
	Von Braun	Michael J. Neufeld	2007	3
	Astronaut handbook	Meghan McCarthy	2008	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

AstronomyAtheismAttentionAuctionsAuditingAutomation

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.