Space Nonfiction

Meet Ellen Ochoa, once just a girl from Los Angeles, California. The granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, Ellen would pursue a career in physics at a young age, and go on to earn master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. In 1993, Ellen became the first Latina in space. As a retired astronaut, she’s served as director of the Johnson Space Center, become an advocate for women and minorities in STEM fields, and was inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

Born and raised in India, Kalpana Chawla was told that she shouldn’t try to become an aeronautical engineer because it was hard for women everywhere to succeed in that field. But she persisted, getting her university degree and then immigrating to the US to keep studying. She then joined NASA and became the first Indian-born American woman to go to space. Though she was tragically killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, she continues to inspire people in India, the United States, and around the world to pursue their dreams of reaching for the stars.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team unveiled the first ever image of a super massive black hole. This inspiring scientific breakthrough took years of hard work, innovative thinking, and a level of global cooperation never seen before. A multinational team of scientists, lead by Dr. Shep Doeleman and Dr. Heino Falkem, used eight of the largest telescopes from around the world to collect more than four million billion bytes of data, which was flown to teams of computer scientists and mathematicians.

Look up into the sky on any cloudless night, and chances are you’ll see the Moon. Our glowing neighbor in space is as familiar to us as the Sun and the stars. You may even have imagined walking on its surface. But how much do you really know about the Moon? You may already know that the Moon is our planet’s only natural satellite, that it circles the Earth, and that we can watch it go through phases from round and full to thin like a sickle. But do you know how high you could jump on the Moon? Or what the Moon’s seas are made of?

You’ve heard of the space race, but do you know the whole story? The most ambitious race humankind has ever undertaken was masterminded in the shadows by two engineers on opposite sides of the Cold War - Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi officer living in the US, and Sergei Korolev, a Russian rocket designer once jailed for crimes against his country - and your textbooks probably never told you. From Amy Cherrix comes the extraordinary hidden story of the space race and the bitter rivalry that launched humankind to the moon.

Los lectores principiantes aprenderán sobre los patrones básicos del Sol y la Tierra y lo que causa día y noche.

This nonfiction book for elementary kids chronicles the amazing voyage of Nefertiti, the Spidernaut to the International Space Station and back. She’s a Phiddipus johnsonii, or Johnson jumping spider, native to Western United States. Her colorful anatomy - red, black, and teal - made for stunning photography and video. In 2012, Nefertitti clocked a record-breaking 100 days in space, during which time she circled Earth about 1584 times, traveling about 41,580,000 miles.