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A boy growing up in America during the Great Depression of the 1930s -- ambitious, inquisitive, blessed with endless energy -- had the world at his doorstep. Donald Beattie was such a boy. His many careers took him to all 50 states and 40 countries, a saga of adventure, exploration and discovery that will delight the old and fuel the dreams of the young. Donald Beattie served in the United States Navy, worked for Mobil as a geologist, with NASA as the same, and with the National Science Foundation in the field of energy. But that is just a taste. This book will satisfy scientist and layman alike. It is both a tribute to his thousands of coworkers and a memoir for his grandchildren. Its many photographs bring his stories vividly to life.

Even fifty years later there are still important stories waiting to be told about how humans first walked on another world; such as the one in this book. Take a trip back to the 1950s when the Chance Vought Company, builders of some of America''s top fighter aircraft, were quietly figuring out how to get men to the moon using something they called Project MALLAR. It is the story of a team of engineers who built some of the most sophisticated space simulators in the world, where almost all of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts learned the art of spaceflight. This same team produced the first serious plan to use modular spacecraft and a technique called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous to make it possible to get to the moon. This book also reveals how for several years rocket genius Wernher von Braun overlooked his own ideas, before having them reintroduced back to him because of Project MALLAR, and how Vought''s fighter aircraft weaved in and out of the Apollo story and then contributed to almost every major airliner in the sky today. Included are rare illustrations, some from recently declassified reports, of the earliest designs for the rockets and spacecraft that led to the greatest technological achievement in human history. In Manned Lunar Landing And Return, Robert Godwin takes the reader back to the time long before President Kennedy made his famous proclamation to reach for the moon and reveals one critical thread in the trail of genius which ended in the Sea of Traquility.

In 2015 author Robert Godwin revealed the story of William Leitch an almost unknown Scottish/Canadian scientist who in 1861 suggested that rockets could be used for spaceflight because they obeyed Newtonian principles. In William Leitch Presbyterian Scientist and the Concept of Rocket Spaceflight 1854-64 Godwin reveals the life of this brilliant mind from the early Victorian era. In September 1861 Leitch wrote an essay called "A Journey Through Space" in which he proposed the idea that a rocket would be the most efficient way to travel outside the Earth's atmosphere. His idea would be forgotten and not be "rediscovered" for another three decades. Beginning from Leitch's humble birth on the Isle of Bute in western Scotland, this book takes you through his education alongside William Thomson, later the most famous scientist of the 19th century, through his many scientific lectures on everything from the mysteries of electricity to the viability of alien life on other planets, before concluding in Kingston Ontario where he struggled to convince Canada's first Prime Minister to try and establish a fair educational system for all Canadians. In this greatly expanded second edition Godwin dissects more than three dozen newly discovered essays by William Leitch in which he discusses some of the profound mysteries of all time. Babbage and his "analytical engine" and the significance of artificial intelligence; the special relationship between light and time and a connection to Albert Einstein; the need for a grand unifying theory to explain the universe; a remote possibility of a connection to Robert Goddard and a very definite connection to the flight of Apollo 11. The story of William Leitch shatters many modern preconceptions about the fragile truce between science and religion in the early 19th century and adds a new wrinkle in the history of space flight.