#27: Meredith Bagby, The New Guys

[kareila]

Subtitled "The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel", this is a fantastic character study of the minority members of the astronaut class of 1978, the "Thirty-Five New Guys" or TFNGs, that included the first American women and people of color to visit outer space. Although I was already familiar with many of the anecdotes related here from watching Challenger: The Final Flight on Netflix and reading Almost Astronauts, Bringing Columbia Home and Kathy Sullivan's autobiography (among others), this does an excellent job of tying decades of anecdotes about these explorers and their spacecraft together in one book. I especially enjoyed learning more about astronaut Anna Fisher, whose significant contributions to NASA I had not found related elsewhere.