"To a Distant Day", the third installment in the Outward Odyssey series ("Into That Silent Sea" and "In the Shadow of the Moon") fully deserves to stand alongside the first two wonderful books hopefully already on your library shelf! However, my initial response to the release of this book was not with the same excitement as the first two books; this wasn't going to be a book about the astronauts and the right stuff, telling us more about their fantastic journeys through new and exclusive personal interviews. In fact, most of the heroes that Mr. Gainor writes about are deceased, but that doesn't stop him from bringing these early pioneers to life. The author recreates the colorful history of how rocketry came to be, and how it grew into the backbone of how we flew to the moon, and more. This is a part of history that I ignored up to now, but after reading "To a Distant Day" I need to read and learn even more about the people who designed and built the first machines capable of breaking earth's grasp. We flew to the moon standing on the shoulders of these early pioneers and geniuses who, in spite of their own idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities deserve their place in history. This book is very well written and just as difficult to put down as the first two books; it's your loss if you don't read it. Thank you Mr. Gainor!

I was looking for a book covering all rocket developers of the 20th century, showing how they interacted, competed and learned from each other. That's exactly what this recently-published book delivers.

Its strength comes from the demonstration of these interactions. Learn how the early pioneers such as Tsiolkovsky and Goddard went as far as they could alone, independently of each other, often rediscovering physical laws and each others' work and not even realizing it. Learn how Von Braun's being hired by the German Army prior to WWII ultimately led to Neil and Buzz setting foot on the moon, as well as the establishment of the "military-industrial complex." Learn how the long-mysterious Soviet "Chief Designer," Korolev, rose from imprisonment at a Stalinist gulag to orchestrate the Soviet space effort that very nearly beat the US to the moon.

If this book has any drawbacks, I'd say it's a little short. However it does provide an excellent bibliography in its "sources" section for those interested in further reading.