Humans have always looked up into space and wondered what was out there. Astronomers have been able to track and predict the movements of celestial bod-ies for centuries, but it is only in the last 50 years that space travel has become a reality. "Space-The Ultimate Frontier" exam-ines those years and tells in words and pictures the re-markable story that saw humans leave the confines of Earth, land on the Moon, send unmanned missions to other planets, and send craft outside the Solar Sys-tem.

After an introduction that looks at the military beginnings of rocketry, "Space - The Ulti-mate Frontier" tells the story of manned spaceflight in five main chapters:

The Race To Space looks at the hugely exciting period at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s when Russia and the United States raced to dominate the high ground and took the Cold War outside the atmos-phere.

The Race To The Moon details the continuation of the space race after John F.Kennedy's dra-matic decision to put an Ameri-can on the Moon-the Gemini and Apollo programs that saw 12 men walk,ride,even hit golf balls on the surface of the Moon.

After The Moon covers the initial anticlimactic period af-ter the Moon landings, the first space stations, the development of the reusable space shuttle,and the Hubble telescope that has done so much to show us what lies beyond our galaxy.

The Outer Planets studies the exploration of our Solar Sys-tem the probes and landers that brought back ever more intimate photography of our planetary neighbors with such missions as Mariner, Voyager,and Galileo.

The Future, as its title sug-gests, looks at what we can ex-pect in the next few years: the development of space-going facilities in countries around the globe such as China, India, and Japan; tourists in space; and, of course, the propulsion systems that will enable manned mis-sions into the depths of our Solar System.

Infinity is a huge space and the images brought back to Earth need a broad canvas to do them justice: "Space - The Ultimate Frontier" provides that canvas ice to spectacular photographs.

Every single manned spaceflight from the Russians,the Ameri-cans,the Chinese and the com-mercial sector are detailed in chronological order and supple-mented with stunning photog-raphy.