posted 11-15-2011 02:29 PM               

Americans have been driven to explore beyond the horizon ever since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. In the twentieth century, that drive took us to the moon and inspired dreams of setting foot on other planets and voyaging among the stars.

The vehicle we built to launch those far journeys was the space shuttle — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor. This fleet of reusable spacecraft was designed to be our taxi to earth orbit, where we would board spaceships heading for strange new worlds.

While the shuttle program never accomplished that goal, its 135 missions sent more than 350 people on a courageous journey into the unknown.

Last Launch is a stunning photographic tribute to America's space shuttle program. Dan Winters was one of only a handful of photographers to whom NASA gave close-range access to photograph the last launches of Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor. Positioning automatically controlled cameras at strategic points around the launch pad — some as close as seven hundred feet — he recorded images of take-offs that capture the incredible power and transcendent beauty of the blast that sends the shuttle hurtling into space.

Winters also takes us on a visual tour of the shuttle as a marvel of technology — from the crew spaces with their complex instrumentation, to the massive engines that propelled the shuttle, to the enormous vehicle assembly building where the shuttles were prepared for flight.

About the Author

Known for the broad range of subject matter he is able to interpret, Dan Winters has had his photographs published in Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Time, Texas Monthly, Wired, Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and many other national and international publications.

Aperture published a book of his magazine work titled Dan Winters: Periodical Photographs. Winters has won over one hundred national and international awards from American Photography, Communication Arts, the Society of Publication Designers, PDN, the Art Directors Club of New York, and Life, among others, as well as the prestigious Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography and a world press photo award in the arts category. In 2003, he was honored by Kodak as a photo "Icon" in their biographical "Legends" series.

• Hardcover: 160 pages
  
• Publisher: University of Texas Press (May 15, 2012)
  
• ISBN-10: 029273963X
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0292739635

posted 10-17-2012 07:11 PM               

It is big at 12" long and 10" wide. There is a little bit of text, mostly at the beginning (including some text from Mark Kelly), but most of the book is pictures of the shuttle taking up almost the entire page. The pictures are beautiful, so clear that you can read the numbers on the tiles.

There is a picture of the aft-end of the shuttle with all three engines removed which shows spectacular detail of the insides of that area. There are also stand-alone pictures of the engines and other elements such as the control console at Mission Control.

As I was looking through the book, I noticed blank pages in the book; I thought maybe I had a misprinted book. At the end of the book, however, there are thumbnails of each page, telling you what you were looking at, and it shows the blank pages. I just found that a strange choice.

I would have liked the author to use all of that real-estate to display other pictures. However, that does not detract from the overall book.

posted 11-09-2012 05:02 AM               

Second all the photos in the book are very dark (like the cover image below). It's obvious the artist likes dark grey cloudy skys, but in every shot? The orbiter is so dark it looks grey or silver in many images.

Finally most of the photos just aren't that special. There are some extreme close ups that will be useful to modelers, but I've seen better, clearer, more dynamic photos of the stack, the pads and the launches themselves elsewhere.