8 Space Exploration Books to Add to Your TBR

I got this for my son when we started our astronomy unit in homeschool back in September, and I don’t think he’s stopped reading and rereading it since then. It’s a constant fixture in his playroom while he builds his LEGO spacecrafts. It’s a Lonely Planet Kids book, so you know it’s going to be good, and it doesn’t disappoint. Anything your kid (or you) wanted to know about space exploration? It’s probably in here: history, important people, different spacecrafts, future goals, practical issues, and much, much more, all of which are accompanied by plenty of pictures, infographics, and maps.

Melvin didn’t set out to be an astronaut; in fact, he was a football player for the Detroit Lions. After a career-ending injury, he ended up joining NASA and went on the shuttle Atlantis to help build the International Space Station — and this is his story. Written for middle grade readers, he details how he dealt with an injury that almost left him permanently Deaf and the ways he faced challenges with a positive attitude and not giving up. (Plus, come on: look at that cover photo! You know it’s going to be a great book with a photo like that!).

While this is a middle grade novel, I included it here because it very much has the spirit of space exploration woven through the entire book. Alex loves space and rockets: so much so that his dog is named Carl Sagan. He wants to send his iPod into space like Sagan sent the Golden Record into space on Voyager in 1977, and so he records all the things going on in his world onto the iPod so lifeforms on other planets know what life on Earth is like. But as time goes on, and secrets start coming out about his family, he starts to wonder who he really has in his life — and what he finds might surprise him.

Even if you’ve seen the movie, I highly recommend the book. Shetterly writes about the Black female mathematicians at NASA who were the “human computers” that crunched numbers to figure out how to launch rockets (and people) into space, and the story is so compelling that you’ll have a hard time putting the book down. She focuses on four women in particular: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, and shares their overlapping and intertwining stories, both personal and professional, and how they changed the world in spite of the rampant racism they faced.

There’s been a lot of talk about colonizing Mars, but just because it might be an option, is it really something we should do? Kelly and Zach Weinersmith take this topic on, and the result is a funny, information-packed guide to space exploration and possible space settlements, answering almost any question under the sun about undertaking such a thing. They explore the geopolitical impacts and considerations, legalities, making babies in space, and intricacies of daily life — and those are just some of the topics here. It’s a thought-provoking, entertaining, but also serious book about how much we don’t know about the practical things we take for granted here about the basic details of life.

We take for granted the diversity of astronauts (which, yes, could still be improved) but it hasn’t always been that way— not at all. Bagby writes about the 1978 astronaut class of NASA, which included the first women, the first African Americans, the first Asian American, and the first LGBTQ+ individual to go to space. Nicknamed “The F*cking New Guys,” this was quite a departure from previous classes and was full of egos, ambition, brilliance, and personality clashes. This book gives you not only a front-row seat to the interpersonal aspects of the class but also a look at the program itself at a time of monumental change and growth.