Ben Evans – författare

‘The man’s an animal’ – so a furious John Cleland vented to millions of TV viewers after being punted out of the 1992 British Touring Car Championship season finale. In an instant, touring car racing had become box office. Super Touring: When Touring Cars Ruled the World is the story of the explosion of touring car racing in the 1990s – underpinned by regulations that led to highly competitive racing and spectacular cars – an era of unrivalled public and manufacturer interest in the sport. At the apex was the British Touring Car Championship, which enjoyed a winning combination of big personalities, crash and bash racing and increasingly exotic machinery. Super Touring comprehensively revisits and reappraises a spectacular decade of action, bringing to life the stories of the time, together with new and exclusive interviews with those behind the wheel and in the paddock.

On February 1st 2003, one of the worst and most public disasters ever witnessed in the human space programme unfolded with horrifying suddenness in the skies above north central Texas. The Space Shuttle Columbia – the world’s first truly reusable manned spacecraft – was lost during her return to Earth, along with a crew of seven. It was an event that, after the loss of Space Shuttle Challenger during a launch 17 years before, the world had hoped it would never see again. This book details each of Columbia’s 28 missions in turn, as told by scientists and researchers who developed and supported her many payloads, by the engineers who worked on her and by the astronauts who flew her. In doing so, it is intended to provide a fitting tribute to this most remarkable flying machine and those who perished on her last mission.

Ironically, the loss of Challenger in January 1986 fired my interest in space exploration more than any other single event. I was nine years old. My parents were, at the time, midway through moving house and, luckily, the TV was one of the few domestic items still to be packed. I watched the entire horror unfold live on all of the network stations. Admittedly, my fascination with rockets and astronauts, stars and planets had begun several years earlier, but Challenger's destruction turned it from an occasional hobby to a fascination which has remained with me ever since. In September 1988, aged 11,1 came home from school to watch STS-26 return the Shuttle fleet to orbital operations. Five years later, I gave a speech on the STS-51L disaster to my teacher as part of my GCSE English assessment. Another decade passed and, now a teacher myself, I returned to my school one cold Monday morning to explain to my pupils what had happened to Challenger's sister ship, Columbia, a few days earlier. In some ways, the loss of Columbia affected me more deeply than Challenger.

To commemorate the momentous 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey into space on 12th April 2011, a series of five books – to be published annually – will explore this half century, decade by decade, to discover how humanity’s knowledge of flying, working and living in space has changed.

Foothold in the Heavens, the second volume in the A History of Human Space Exploration series, focuses upon the 1970s, the decade in which humanity established real, longterm foothold in the heavens with the construction and operation of the first space stations. It marked a transitional phase between the heady, race-to-the-Moon days of the Sixties and efforts to make space travel more economical, more frequent and more 'routine.' Space exploration in the Seventies, although dominated by Soviet achievement, saw the first efforts of mankind to really 'live' and work in space, producing results of direct benefit to humans on Earth. The emphasis changed from the gung-ho, 'strap-it-on-and-go' pioneers of the Sixties to the more practical exploitation of space for science, medicine, and technology. This book focuses on each mission launched between April 1971 and April 1981: from the launch of the world's first space station to the end of operations of Salyut 6, and from the expanded, lengthy exploration of the Moon on Apollo 15 to the first flight of the Shuttle.

This volume, like the others, not only focuses upon the individual missions within the decade but also upon key challenges facing human space exploration at specific points within those years - from the problems of simply breathing and eating in space to the challenges of venturing outside in a pressurized spacesuit, the development of newer and better space toilets, and the difficulties of locomotion on the Moon. The Eighties was a time when traveling into space far more commonplace. Examining in detail the American and Soviet fronts, Ben Evans gives a comprehensive analysis of the varying fortunes of the U.S. space shuttle in the Eighties, including its early test flights and commercial flights, its problems, the 51L tragedy and its aftermath, and the resumption of operations with STS-26. The U.S. story ends with STS-37 in April 1991. In the Soviet sphere, two pivotal space station efforts - Salyut 7 and its succesor, Mir - are considered, showing how they were alike and different.

"Partners in Space" focuses on the early to late 1990s, a time in the post-Soviet era when relations between East and West steadily - though not without difficulty - thawed and the foundations of real harmony and genuine co-operation were laid for the first time with Shuttle-Mir and the International Space Station.

April 12, 2011 is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey into space. To commemorate this momentous achievement, Springer-Praxis is producing a mini series of books that reveals how humanity’s knowledge of flying, working, and living in space has grown in the last half century. “Tragedy and Triumph” focuses on the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union swung like a pendulum between harmony and outright hostility. The glorious achievements of the shuttle were violently arrested by the devastating loss of Challenger in 1986, while the Soviet program appeared to prosper with the last Salyut and the next-generation Mir orbital station. This book explores the continued rivalry between the two superpowers during this period, with each attempting to outdo the other – the Americans keen to build a space station, the Soviets keen to build a space shuttle – and places their efforts in the context of a bitterly divisive decade, which ultimately led them into partnership.

This final entry in the History of Human Space Exploration mini-series by Ben Evans continues with an in-depth look at the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the new millennium. Picking up where Partnership in Space left off, the story commemorating the evolution of manned space exploration unfolds in further detail. More than fifty years after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey into space, Evans extends his overview of how that momentous voyage continued through the decades which followed.The Twenty-first Century in Space, the sixth book in the series, explores how the fledgling partnership between the United States and Russia in the 1990s gradually bore fruit and laid the groundwork for today’s International Space Station. The narrative follows the convergence of the Shuttle and Mir programs, together with standalone missions, including servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, many of whose technical and human lessons enabled the first efforts to build the ISS in orbit. The book also looks to the future of developments in the 21st century.

For more than 50 years the Formula Ford Festival has been the proving ground for ambitious racing drivers looking to make their mark. The Brands Hatch meeting was where the likes of Johnny Herbert, Damon Hill and Jenson Button first made their names, while both Michael Schumacher and Nigel Mansell never made it out of their heats. Now a club meeting, in its heyday the Festival was one of the UK's biggest motor sport events, drawing tens of thousands of spectators, and enjoying more than a decade of prime coverage on the BBC's Grandstand. From humble beginnings at a cold Snetterton, the move to Brands Hatch, the peak of the 1980s followed by a gentle decline, this book tells the story of the Festival. Drawing on exclusive contributions from some of the event's legends and prestigious alumni, it covers all the on-track action together with off-track intrigue and controversies.

In addition to deploying satellites, planetary probes and, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope, it delivered astronauts to the Mir space station and assembled and sustained the International Space Station.

2022 marks the 45th anniversary of the Voyager probe launches. Launched into space in 1977, these twin probes explored the farthest reaches of the Solar System before venturing on a one-way journey beyond, all the while testing the bounds of science, robotic exploration and our collective imagination. This heavily revised commemorative book takes a comprehensive look at their incredible achievements, future potential and overall legacy.Chronicled herein is an epic journey to unveil the mysterious outer reaches of the Solar System for the first time. The book recounts the Voyagers’ travels through the asteroid belt and past the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn, as well as Voyager 2’s forays near the distant ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Each chapter details in full the game-changing scientific data and glorious imagery they sent back to Earth.This new edition incorporates all the new data we have learned in the nearly 20 years since its original publication, discussing how the knowledge first gleaned with Voyager has been built upon in subsequent decades by Cassini, Juno and New Horizons.The Voyager probes captured imaginations around the world; now is an opportune time to reflect on their unparalleled quest across the edges of the Solar System and the enigmatic interstellar medium beyond.

Between 1983 and 1998, Spacelab provided NASA with a vital short-term laboratory in space. Across more than a dozen missions, Spacelab’s pressurized research modules and science pallets supported hundreds of experiments from the life to microgravity sciences, from Earth science to astrophysics and from materials processing to fluid dynamics.For the first time, The Spacelab Story sheds light on all the Spacelab missions that served as pathfinders for the eventual International Space Station, along with all the flights that never came to be. The book chronicles over two decades of service and international partnership with Germany, Japan, Canada, Russia, the member-states of the European Space Agency and others.The very same international co-operation that led to Spacelab’s genesis also conspired to create its end. Science writer Ben Evans chronicles this tumultuous history, showing how, as tensions between the superpowers cooled in the 1990s and the Shuttle cameto be increasingly used to fly joint missions to Mir, many Spacelab missions were delayed and eventually cancelled.This book is a must-read for anybody interested in the science conducted aboard the Shuttle, the experimental precursors of the ISS, and the international politics surrounding NASA’s pioneering space endeavors.