After Astrid tells her father that she wants to be an astronaut, he tells her of all the things that astronauts have to do.

"A young astronaut is trying to find life on Mars, but he's made a very big oversight"--

"When Astronaut Randolph Witherspoon takes a walk--a space walk, that is!--he doesn't hear Ground Control's order to not talk to strangers and winds up making a new friend"--

"Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he...

"When Jakub Procha is sent into space to examine a cosmic dust cloud covering Venus, it may be a solo suicide mission. Dreaming of becoming a national hero and desperate to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he leaves his beloved wife behind and launches into the galaxy. But things aboard spaceship JanHus1 quickly turn weird, and, to make matters worse, he soon learns that his wife has disappeared without a trace back on Earth. As...

It is time to start the colonizing the solar system. Ex-astronaut, current space advisor, and all-out trouble shooter for the President, Jake Ross, is determined to make it happen. And what better way to return to America's glory than by returning to the moon and setting up a permanent moon-base which can then serve as the launching pad for Mars and beyond. But as usual, political intrigue and conflicting priorities are threatening the whole program....

When an ultra-rich space tourist visits the orbiting International Space Station, NASA expects a $100 million win-win: his visit will bring in much needed funding and publicity. But the tourist venture turns into a scheme of terror. Together with an extremist cosmonaut, the tourist slaughters all the astronauts on board the million-pound ISS, and prepares to crash it into New York City at 17,500 miles an hour, causing more devastation than a hundred...

The Gates of the Alamo is a novel about what it's like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today's astronauts." "At the novel's center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader...

"A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots a day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space-not toward the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its...

"In the Quick is the story of June, a brilliant but difficult girl, unloved by her adoptive family, with a gift for mechanical invention, who leaves home to begin a grueling astronaut training program. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station, but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle's fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was twelve years...