LEAVING ORBIT
Notes from the Last Days of American Space Flight
Lecture and Book Signing with Margaret Lazarus Dean

This lecture is free but reservations are required, please call at 516-572-4066 (Mon-Fri, 10-4) to reserve your seat.

Margaret dean was not even born when our Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. She is a product of the space shuttle era and as a child her father took her to the National Air and Space Museum almost every weekend where she developed a love for America’s space program. She watched the “Dream is Alive” in the mid 1980s and remembers it clearly. She has vivid memories of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Dean felt that after the two disasters, many Americans felt the lovely dream of spaceflight became tainted with fallibility.

Dean explores the glory days of the space program to the canceling of the shuttle program. She has interviewed astronauts, NASA workers and space fans. She walks us back in time and urges us to be hopeful and look forward with regard to the space program.

Her first book The Time it Takes to Fall is a novel about the Challenger disaster and Leaving Orbit earned her the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Come and listen to Margaret Dean take you on an exhilarating trip to Cape Canaveral for NASA’s last three space shuttle launches and see where we have been and where we might go.