The NASA Archives. 60 Years in Space Hardcover – January 24, 2019

In short, this coffee table sized book is incredible and a MUST-HAVE item for NASA enthusiasts. If you already own several NASA history books full of photos like I do, trust me—this one’s different and you won’t regret purchasing it.The book is artful in and of itself. Beautifully bound, smooth pages with crisp color, excellent binding, sleek design—the quality is reflected in the price. The large format and black page background, along with the photo placement, size, and paper quality provides a very aesthetically pleasing experience. It’s the type of book you want to set aside time to look through and get absorbed by. Several of the photos were new to me. Many other books have repeats of the same photos, but this book features many I would consider somewhat uncommon and “archival” (hence the title). I’m a space artist and this is excellent reference material for not just historical and design accuracy, but inspiration.The book comes in its own decorative, carrying case-type cardboard box (like many other oversized photo volumes), is shrink wrapped inside the box (if New), and the book is constructed beautifully. I’m not totally sure what I will do with the box, but it’s good for storing the book safely and I suppose would help maintain paper quality over many decades. This book is worth the price.

A quick bit of background...I am a long time space exploration aficionado, have many books mostly to do with manned spaceflight in the 1960's. I have several other recent comparable large hard cover books featuring the manned space program including Moonshots, Moonfire, Full Moon and Apollo VII-XVII.The book....Starting with how this book is packaged - it literally comes (from Amazon anyway) triple boxed. You open the Amazon book, there's a slightly smaller book that is the shipping box for the book. You open that box, the book is inside a shrink-wrapped illustrated carrying case style box complete with handle typical for the largest, most lavish Taschen books. Carefully open the carrying case and this huge 15lb book inside is also shrink-wrapped. Everything graphically about this book is over-the-top. The dust cover and paper stock is thick semi-gloss paper, almost card stock. The dust cover and the chapter break photos have silver ink printing to accentuate the 4 color images. The actual book cover is an embossed photo of Buzz Aldrin's boot print on the lunar surface. The text is fairly large and easy to read. Binding, printing and overall quality of the photos and other images included is outstanding. Perhaps fortunately due to practicality issues, there's no fold-out spreads. This is *not* a book you can cradle in your lap and read, it's just too big and heavy.From a content standpoint, this book gives a very broad overview of American space program in a mostly chronological way. Informatively, this is the kind of book tailored more towards the casual space exploration fan. For the die-hard space enthusiast, almost all the photographs are fairly common, including iconic photos such as Ed White's spacewalk to the Apollo 11 moonwalk images to classic shuttle/spacewalk, ISS and of course, beautiful Hubble deep space photographs. There's also a few illustrations of hardware, missions, etc. The big draw here is the sheer size (most are full page images) and quality of the images included. IMO, I think content-wise, for so-called coffee table sized photo books, Moonshots and (the original full size HC) Full Moon books are a bit better and go a little more in depth but that is in large part because those book focus on the Apollo program itself. But big as those books are, they are physically dwarfed by "The NASA Archives."One thing I would caution potential buyers - be very careful when putting the book back in it's case and closing the top. It's very easy to catch the edge of and accidentally damaging the top of the dust cover.

I bought this book for my own interest in space. There is no library in the world that you can put this enormously huge book on the shelf. It is heavy and big.The packaging is attentive and attractive. The beautiful book is wrapped by a transparent protective shield and put into a beautiful hard cartoon carry case. This case is also wrapped by a transparent protective shield as well. This is the best presentation of a book I have ever seen.The printing of the book is great. They use thick pages which offers perfect quality pictures.I expected more things in the content, but its still fine for me. They use large font sizes in text which makes it easy to read.Overall this book is a good investment for your archives if you have interest in space.

An amazing compilation of greatness

A beautiful collection of photos of the history of the space program. Sorry to say I'm old enough to remember when MOST of the early photos were in the evening news! But this is a great book for any history buff who grew up watching Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley reporting on launches from Cape Canaveral. I was 17 when the Eagle landed on the moon - so this book is something of a chronicle of time that represents some of the best of the happenings in my life. America needs another effort such as this to pull us together again.

This book is done is such high quality fashion that I was in awe of the production value alone. The Essays and photos from NASA's history are even better than expected. I been a big fan of the space program and this book is a great tribute to the men and women of NASA. The books gives us a look at all the people (astronauts, computer programmers, Mathematicians who figured out the path) who got man to the moon and made the Voyager space program and more. F

There are only so many Apollo-era photographs available to the public, and most of these have already been published in all kinds of oversized photography books. But this book introduces a number of new photographs (to me, at least) and is printed on high quality paper. It's a great pleasure to read.

Ordered this for a family member that is taking classes at Nasa. I am so excited to give this to her this Christmas. Comes in a really nice box.