Agent Palmer

Amy Shira Teitel’s Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight features two characters who, while separated by 25 years in age, both lead the way for Sally Ride, but it wasn’t a smooth flight.

It’s compelling in the most dramatic of ways, and not just because the space program NASA had at the start consisted of “a bunch of rockets with a tendency to explode.” And despite a rallying cry of wanting the first woman in space to be American, it was Valentina Tereshkova from the Soviet Union who got there first.

Val Kilmer is one of those actors. How you know him is most often related to either the first movie you saw him in or your favorite film of his. Is he your top secret agent? Your Real Genius? Your Iceman? Your Madmartigan? Your Batman? Your Lizard King? Your Bank Robber? Your Saint? Or your Huckleberry?

Well, no matter what he is to you, he’s an artist and his memoir is a thing of poetry written in prose. There is much more to Val Kilmer than the roles he has played, but the stories that he writes about…

When you read as much on the subject of early NASA even back to the Space Task Group, predecessor to NASA, there are a few names that always come up, and one of them is Chris Kraft.

He was basically the father of what would become Mission Control as we know it today, and in his autobiography Flight: My Life in Mission Control, the first NASA Flight Director, known simply as Flight, holds no punches.