EDITORIAL INFORMATION

This is the third edition of Orders of Magnitude, a concise history of the National Advisory Commitee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the agency that followed it, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This edition commemorates the 75th. anniversary of the creation of the NACA, the first American national institution for the advance of powered human flight. Besides updating its history with new facts, this third edition has been widened with a more detailed aeronautics summary as well as additional chapters about the NACA activity from 1915 till 1958.

(Extracted from the presentation.)

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Preface.

-NACA Origins (1915-1930).

-New Facilities, New Designs (1930-1945).

-Going Supersonic (1945-1958).

-On the Fringes of Space (1958-1964).

-Tortoise Becames Hare (1964-1969).

-Aerospace Dividends (1969-1973).

-On the Eve of Shuttle (1973-1980).

-Aerospace Flights (1980-1986).

-New Directions (Since 1986).

-Summary.

-Bibliographic Essay.

-Index.

-The NASA History Series.

-Reference Works.

-About the Author.

OUR REVIEW

This book is useful to provide a general perspective of the history of aeronautics and astronautics related to the activity of the NACA and the NASA. In this sense, it is both an excellent reference book and a divulgative work to be read in its entirety. The facts, some of them little known, are narrated in a pleasant way, without unnecessary technicalities. At the same time, though this work does not intend to gather data in an exhaustive way, everything that matters is included in it. The part of the book devoted to the period 1915-1958 is perhaps the most interesting one, since it narrates a part of the history that does not usually come to be included in historical works about the NASA and its predecessors. Having extended the book in this third edition with these additional chapters is therefore a good idea. The specialized reader will find a clear summary of the facts, and the unskilled reader will be amazed when discoverinng how very active aeronautic research was in the NACA. With respect to the photos, the most interesting ones are the oldest ones, since the reader could hardly see them published in other books given their unusual character. In this sense, the research effort done in the graphic files with respect to the NACA is also remarkable.