Linda Billings is coordinator of communications for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Astrobiology Program in the Science Mission Directorate. (She is on assignment to NASA under an Intergovernmental Personnel Agreement with the SETI Institute of Mountain View, CA.) As astrobiology communications coordinator, Dr. Billings is responsible for reviewing, assessing, and coordinating communications, education, and public outreach activities sponsored by the Astrobiology Program.

From September 2002 through December 2006, Dr. Billings conducted science and risk communication research for NASA’s Planetary Protection Office. From September 1999 through August 2002, she was Director of Communications for SPACEHAB Inc., a builder of space habitats.

Dr. Billings has three decades of experience in Washington, D.C., as a researcher, journalist, freelance writer, communication specialist and consultant to the government. She was the founding editor of Space Business News (1983-5) and the first senior editor for space at Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine (1985-8). She also was a contributing author for First Contact: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New American Library, 1990). Dr. Billings was a member of the staff for the National Commission on Space (1985-86). Her freelance articles have been published in outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post Magazine, and Space News.

Dr. Billings’ expertise is in mass communication, science communication, risk communication, rhetorical analysis, journalism studies, and social studies of science. Her research has focused on the role that journalists play in constructing the cultural authority of scientists and the rhetorical strategies that scientists and journalists employ in communicating about science. She earned her B.A. in social sciences from the State University of New York at Binghamton, her M.A. in international transactions from George Mason University, and her Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University’s School of Journalism.

Andrew J. Butrica earned his Ph.D. in history of technology and science from Iowa State University in 1986. He then worked at the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project and the Center for Research in the History of Science and Technology in Paris. Subsequently, as a contract historian, he has researched and written Out of Thin Air, a history of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., a Fortune 500 firm; Beyond the Ionosphere, a history of satellite communications; To See the Unseen, a history of planetary radar astronomy, which won the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians; and Single Stage To Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry, which was recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press and won the 2005 Michael C. Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History. In addition, he was the historian on NASA’s X-33 Program and currently is a historian on the Defense Acquisition History Project responsible for researching and writing the fourth volume of From the Reagan Buildup to the End of the Cold War, 1981–1990.

Martin J. Collins is a Curator in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in history of science and technology. Book publications include Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State (2002); Showcasing Space, edited with Douglas Millard, Volume 6, Artifacts series: Studies in the History of Science and Technology (2005); and After Sputnik (2007), editor. He is currently working on a history of satellite telephony and globalism in the 1990s.

Jonathan Coopersmith is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University, where he has taught the history of technology since 1988. He received his D.Phil in 1985 in Modern History at Oxford University. His books include The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926 and, with co-editor Roger Launius, Taking Off: A Century of Manned Flight. Currently, his main areas of research are the history of the fax machine from the 1840s to the present and the close links between communication technologies and pornography.

Dwayne A. Day is currently a staff officer with the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences which advises NASA on space science programs. He has served as study director for several past and current NRC reports, including Space Radiation Hazards and the Vision for Space Exploration, and Building a Better NASAWorkforce: Meeting the Workforce Needs of the National Vision for Space Exploration. He is currently study director for the Committee to Assess Solar System Exploration, and the Committee on New Opportunities in Solar System Exploration. He previously served as an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, was on the staff of the Congressional Budget Office, and also worked for the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University. He has held Guggenheim and Verville fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and is an associate editor of the German spaceflight magazine Raumfahrt Concret in addition to writing for several international and domestic publications such as Novosti Kosmonavtiki (Russia), Spaceflight, and Space Chronicle (United Kingdom).

Steven J. Dick is the Chief Historian for NASA. He obtained his B.S. in astrophysics (1971) and his M.A. and Ph.D. (1977) in history and philosophy of science from Indiana University. He worked as an astronomer and historian of science at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, for 24 years before coming to NASA Headquarters in 2003. Among his books are Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (1982), The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (1996), and Life on Other Worlds (1998). The latter has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Czech, Polish and Greek. His most recent books are The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology (2004) and a comprehensive history of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. Naval Observatory, 1830–2000 (2003). The latter received the Pendleton Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government. He is editor of Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life and the Theological Implications (2000), editor (with Keith Cowing) of the proceedings of the NASA Administrator's symposium Risk and Exploration: Earth, Sea and the Stars (2005), and (with Roger Launius) Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (2006). He is the recipient of the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Medal. He received the NASA Group Achievement Award for his role in NASA’s multidisciplinary program in astrobiology. He has served as chairman of the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society as president of the History of Astronomy Commission of the International Astronomical Union, and he as president of the Philosophical Society of Washington. He is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Slava Gerovitch is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include the history of Soviet science and technology during the Cold War, especially cosmonautics, cybernetics, and computing. His book From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002) received an honorable mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for an outstanding monograph in Russian, Eurasian, or East European studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. His articles appeared in the journals Technology and Culture, Social Studies of Science, Science in Context, and The Russian Review and in the collections Science and Ideology, Cultures of Control, and Universities and Empire. His most recent article on human-machine issues in the Soviet space program was published in the collection Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (2006). He is the recipient of the 2007-2008 Fellowship in Aerospace History from the American Historical Association. He received two doctorates in the history and social study of science and technology from the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992) and from MIT (1999).

James R. Hansen is Professor of History in the Department of History at Auburn University in Alabama, where he teaches courses on the history of flight, history of science and technology, space history, and the history of technological failure. He has published nine books and three-dozen articles on a wide variety of technological topics ranging from the early days of aviation to the first nuclear fusion reactors, to the Moon landings, to the environmental history of golf course development. His books include First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (2005); The Bird is on the Wing: Aerodynamics and the Progress of the Airplane in America (2003); The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey through the History of Aerodynamics in America (Vol. 1, 2002), Spaceflight Revolution (1995), From the Ground Up (1988), and Engineer in Charge (1987). Hansen earned a B.A. degree with High Honors from Indiana University (1974) and an M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1981) from The Ohio State University. He served as historian for NASA Langley Research in Hampton, Virginia, from 1981 to 1984, and as a professor at the University of Maine in 1984-85. Professor Hansen has received a number of citations for his scholarship, including the National Space Club’s Robert H. Goddard Award, Air Force Historical Foundation’s Distinction of Excellence, American Astronautical Society’s Eugene Emme Prize in Astronautical Literature (twice), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ History Book Award; and AIAA Distinguished Lecturer. He has served on a number of important advisory boards and panels, including the Research Advisory Board of the National Air and Space Museum, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Institution Press, the Advisory Board for the Archives of Aerospace Exploration at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the Museum Advisory Board of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the board of directors of the Space Restoration Society. He is a past vice-president of the board of directors of the Virginia Air and Space Museum and Hampton Roads History Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Robert G Kennedy III, PE, took Heinlein's advice about a liberal education to heart. He is a registered professional mechanical engineer (robotics specialty for military, nuclear, and industrial applications) in Tennessee and California. He minored in Soviet studies and holds a Special Master of Arts in National Security Studies, and speaks, reads, and writes Russian, Latin and to a lesser degree, Arabic and Classical Greek. In 1994, he was selected as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Congressional Fellow for that year, working for the Subcommittee on Space in the United States House of Representatives. Also in 1994, he was invited to present Robert A Heinlein: The Competent Man at the Library of Congress. In 1997, he published, manufactured and distributed the Russian CD-ROM 40th Anniversary of Sputnik: Russians in Space. Also in 1997-1999, he served on the Where To? panel in the inaugural issues of The Heinlein Journal, which is published by The Heinlein Society. He is an amateur military historian, published artist and writer on strategic affairs in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society among other venues, and past chair of ASME's Technology & Society Division. He currently resides, with his spouse and numerous cats, under his own vine and fig tree in the Manhattan Project city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Bettyann Kevles is a lecturer in the History department at Yale University. She writes about science, technology and popular culture. Her most recent book, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space, (paperback revised edition MIT Press 2006), is a cross-cultural exploration of the lives and ambitions of women who have traveled into orbit. During 2000 she held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Space History at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Almost Heaven was selected as the best science book of 2003 by the American Library Association and in 2005 she was awarded the Educator’s Award for the book by Women in Aerospace. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she lived in Pasadena, California where she wrote a regular science column and science book reviews for the Los Angeles Times, taught at the Art Center College of Design, and became an active member of the Planetary Society.

Sylvia K. Kraemer served as NASA Chief Historian from 1983-1990, and from 1990-2004 as Director, Policy Development; Director, Interagency Relations; and Chair, Inventions and Contributions Board, all at NASA. She obtained her PhD in history from The Johns Hopkins University. Among many other publications, she is the author of NASA Engineers and the Age of Apollo (1992).

John Krige (PhD, Physical Chemistry, Pretoria, 1965; PhD, Philosophy, Sussex, 1979) is an historian who specializes on the place of science and technology in the postwar reconstruction of Europe. He was a member of a multinational team that wrote the history of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), and the leader of the project that produced a two-volume history of the European Space Agency. Krige is the editor of the journal History and Technology and has served on the editorial board of the several other journals. His current research deals with the use of science and technology as instruments of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, notably in its relations with Western Europe. His new book, American Hegemony and Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, was published by the MIT Press in 2006. He also edited (with Kai Henrik Barth, Georgetown University ), Vol. 21 of OSIRIS entitled Global Power Knowledge. Science and Technology in International Affairs (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In academic Year 2004-5, Krige was the Charles E. Lindberg Professor of Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In May 2005 he was awarded the Henry W. Dickinson medal by the (British) Newcomen Society for the Study of Technology and Society. In Fall 2006 Krige was a Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.

Monique Laney is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program at the University of Kansas. Her dissertation explores the immigration and integration process of German families associated with Project Paperclip and Wernher Von Braun who moved to Huntsville, Alabama in the 1950s. For this investigation she uses oral histories, archival material, newspaper clippings, literature, and film. Currently Ms. Laney is finishing a pre-doctoral Smithsonian fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. She holds an M.A. degree in American Studies from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, and her research interests include national identity, U.S. immigration history, history and memory, German-Americans after WWII, and the cultural and social impact of the U.S. on Germany and vice versa. Her first publication, The New York Times and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: Two Perspectives on the War in Iraq, appeared in Safeguarding German-American Relations in the New Century: Understanding and Accepting Mutual Differences, eds. Kurthen, Hermann; Antonio V. Menendez-Alarcon; and Stefan Immerfall (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books - Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

Roger D. Launius is a member of the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Between 1990 and 2002 he served as chief historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A graduate of Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, he received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1982. He has written or edited more than twenty books on aerospace history, including Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (NASA SP-2006-4702, 2006); Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars (Smithsonian Books, 2003), which received the AIAA’s history manuscript prize; Reconsidering a Century of Flight (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); To Reach the High Frontier: A History of U.S. Launch Vehicles (University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Imagining Space: Achievements, Possibilities, Projections, 1950-2050 (Chronicle Books, 2001); Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (Harwood Academic, 2000); Innovation and the Development of Flight (Texas A&M University Press, 1999); Frontiers of Space Exploration (Greenwood Press, 1998, rev. ed. 2004); Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (University of Illinois Press, 1997); and NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program (Krieger Publishing Co., 1994, rev. ed. 2001). He served as a consultant to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 and presented the Harmon Memorial Lecture on the history of national security space policy at the United States Air Force Academy in 2006. He is frequently consulted by the electronic and print media for his views on space issues, and has been a guest commentator on National Public Radio and all the major television networks.

Cathleen Lewis is Curator of International Space programs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, specializing in Soviet and Russian programs. Her current research is on the history of the public and popular culture of the early years of human spaceflight in the Soviet Union. She has completed degrees in Russian and East European Studies at Yale University and is currently writing her dissertation, The Red Stuff: A History of the Public and Material Culture of Early Human Spaceflight in the U.S.S.R., 1959-1968 in the History Department at George Washington University.

John M. Logsdon is Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he is also Research Professor and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and of International Affairs. From 1983-2001, he was also Director of the School’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy. He has been a faculty member at GW since 1970; from 1966-1970 he taught at the Catholic University of America. He holds a B.S. in Physics from Xavier University (1960) and a Ph.D. in Political Science from New York University (1970). Dr. Logsdon’s research interests focus on the policy and historical aspects of U.S. and international space activities.

Dr. Logsdon is the author of The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest and is general editor of the eight-volume series Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. He has written numerous articles and reports on space policy and history, and authored the basic article on “space exploration” for the most recent edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Dr. Logsdon has lectured and spoken to a wide variety of audiences at professional meetings, colleges and universities, international conferences, and other settings, and has testified before Congress on several occasions. He has served as a consultant to many public and private organizations. He is frequently consulted by the electronic and print media for his views on space issues.

Dr. Logsdon is a member of the NASA Advisory Council and of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee of the Department of Transportation. In 2003 he served as a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Public Service and Public Service Medals from NASA, the 2005 John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award from the American Astronautical Society, and the 2006 Barry Goldwater Space Educator Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and former Chair of its Commission on Space Policy, Law, and Economics. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Planetary Society and member of the Society’s Advisory Council. He is faculty member of the International Space University and former member of its Board of Trustees. He is on the editorial board of the international journal Space Policy and was its North American editor from 1985-2000. He is also on the editorial board of the journal Astropolitics.

Dr. Logsdon has served as a member of a blue-ribbon international committee evaluating Japan’s National Space Development Agency and of the Committee on Human Space Exploration of the Space Studies Board, National Research Council. He has also served on the Vice President’s Space Policy Advisory Board, the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Research Council, NASA’s Space and Earth Sciences Advisory Committee, and the Research Advisory Committee of the National Air and Space Museum. He has served as the Director of the District of Columbia Space Grant Consortium. He is former Chairman of the Committee on Science and Public Policy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Education Committee of the International Astronautical Federation. He has twice been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was the first holder of the Chair in Space History of the National Air and Space Museum.

Robert MacGregor is currently a graduate student in the History of Science program at Princeton University. Before coming to Princeton he studied at Rice University in Houston, Texas where he received a B.S. Chemical Physics and a B.A. History. Robert has also studied at Moscow State University in Russia where he studied Russian language, history, and culture. His current work focuses on the processes in the US government that lead to the formation of NASA between the launch of Sputnik in October 1957 and the signing into law of the National Air and Space Act in July 1958. In the future he plans to delve into the history of the Soviet space program, and the early amateur rocket societies in Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

Hans Mark became Deputy Administrator of NASA in July 1981. He had previously served as Secretary of the Air Force from July 1979 until February 1981, and as Under Secretary of the Air Force since 1977. Dr. Mark was born in Mannheim, Germany, June 17, 1929. He came to the United States in 1940, and became a citizen in 1945. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1951 and his doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954. In February 1969, Mark became director of NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, where he managed the center's research and applications efforts in aeronautics, space science, life science and space technology. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in physics and engineering at Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at both the Berkeley and Davis campuses.

Following completion of graduate studies, Dr. Mark remained at MIT as a research associate and acting head of the Neutron Physics Group, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, until 1955. He then returned to the University of California at Berkeley as a research physicist at the University's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore until 1958. He subsequently served as an assistant professor of physics at MIT before returning to the University of California's Livermore Radiation Laboratory's Experimental Physics Division from 1960 until 1964. He then became chairman of the university's Department of Nuclear Engineering and administrator of the Berkeley Research Reactor until joining NASA at Ames.

Dr. Mark has served as a consultant to government, industry and business, including the Institute for Defense Analyses and the President's Advisory Group on Science and Technology. He has authored many articles for professional and technical journals. He also co-authored the books Experiments in Modern Physics and Power and Security, and co-edited The Properties of Matter under Unusual Conditions. He also published The Space Station: A Personal Journey (Duke University Press, 1987), and The Management of Research Institutions (NASA SP-481, 1984).

When Dr. Mark left NASA in 1984 he became Chancellor of the University of Texas system, a post he held until 1992. He then became a senior professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas-Austin. In July 1998, he took a job at the Pentagon, becoming the Director, Defense Research and Engineering. In January 2001, he returned to the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and the University of Texas at Austin.

Walter A. McDougall is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations and History and the University of Pennsylvania. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize for history, election to the Society of American Historians, and appointment to the Library of Congress Council of Scholars. McDougall graduated from New Trier (Illinois) High School (1964) and Amherst College, Massachusetts (1968). After serving in the U.S. Army artillery in Vietnam, he took a PhD under world historian William H. McNeill at the University of Chicago (1974). The following year he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, and taught there until 1988, when he was offered the chair at Penn. McDougall is also a Senior Fellow at Philadelphia's Foreign Policy Research Institute where he edited its journal Orbis and now co-directs its History Academy for secondary school teachers. His articles and columns have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Commentary, and other national publications. An unabashed generalist, his books range from France's Rhineland Diplomacy 1914-1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (1978), and ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), to Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific From Magellan to MacArthur (1992), Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997), and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828. His current project, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877, will appear early in 2008. A lover of books, music from Bach to Bob Dylan, chess, sports, and politics, McDougall lives with his wife and two teenagers in suburban Philadelphia.

J.R. McNeill was born in Chicago on October 6, 1954. He studied at Swarthmore College and Duke University, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1981. Since 1985 he has taught some 2,500 students at Georgetown University, in the History Department and School of Foreign Service, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs before becoming University Professor in 2006. His research interests lie in the environmental history of the Mediterranean world, the tropical Atlantic world, and Pacific islands. He has held two Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur grant, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He has published more than 40 scholarly articles in professional and scientific journals. His books are The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 1700-1765 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Atlantic American Societies from Columbus through Abolition (co-edited, London: Routledge, 1992); The Mountains of the Mediterranean World (New York: Cambridge University Press); The Environmental History of the Pacific World (edited, London: Variorum, 2001); Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (New York: Norton, 2000), co-winner of the World History Association book prize, the Forest History Society book prize, and runner-up for the BP Natural World book prize, and translated into 6 languages; and most recently The Human Web: A Bird’s-eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), co-authored with his father William H. McNeill. He also edited or co-edited five more books, including the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (New York: Routledge, 2003). He is currently working on a history of yellow fever in the Americas from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries.

Amy Nelson (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech. A specialist in Russian and Soviet Culture, her current research focuses on the significance of non-human animals in Russian-Soviet History. She is writing a collective biography of the Soviet space dogs and, together with Jane Costlow (Bates College), is editing a volume of essays entitled, The Other Animals: Situating the Non-Human in Russian Culture and History. Nelson is the author of Music for the Revolution. Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (Penn State University Press), which received the Heldt Prize for "The Best Book by a Woman in Any Area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies," from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies in 2005. Her recent publications include, A Hearth for a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping, in Borders of Socialism. Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum (New York, 2006), and Accounting for Taste: Choral Circles in Early Soviet Workers' Clubs, in Chorus and Community, ed. Karen Ahlquist, (Chicago, 2006).

Michael J. Neufeld is Chair of the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Born in Canada, he received history degrees from the University of Calgary and the University of British Columbia, before getting a Ph.D. in Modern European History from The Johns Hopkins University in 1984. Before Dr. Neufeld came to the National Air and Space Museum in 1988 as A. Verville Fellow, he taught at various universities in upstate New York. In 1989-90 he held Smithsonian and NSF fellowships at NASM. In 1990 he was hired as a Museum Curator in the Aeronautics Division, where he remained until early 1999. After transferring to the Space History Division, he took over the collection of German World War II missiles, and from 2003-2007 the collection of Mercury and Gemini spacecraft and components. In fall 2001, he was a Senior Lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was named Chair of Space History in January 2007.

In addition to authoring numerous scholarly articles, Dr. Neufeld has written three books: The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg: Craft and Class in the Industrial Revolution (1989), The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (1995), which won two book prizes, and Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, which is forthcoming in September 2007. He has also edited Yves Béon’s memoir Planet Dora (1997) and is the co-editor of The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (2000).

James Oberg is one of the world's leading popularizers and interpreters of space exploration. As the NBC News 'Space Consultant' he often appears in broadcast and website assessments of space events, explaining them and placing them in broader context, and usual breaking 'inside stories' far ahead of other news media sites. As guide for public-access expeditions to space-related locations for the American Museum of Natural History, he interprets space achievements as manifestations of human ingenuity and creativity, painted on metal and concrete and plastic rather than the more traditional canvas and marble and textiles. As contributor to numerous space technology publications he assesses in depth the important accomplishments and trends of developments in space activities around the world, not only in the US but in Russia and China and elsewhere.

When he was an active 'rocket scientist', Oberg had a 22-year career as a space engineer in Houston, where he specialized in NASA space shuttle operations for orbital rendezvous, as a contractor employee. He was a 'NASA Trainee' at Northwestern University in 1966-9, and worked at the Johnson Space Center in Houston 1975-1997. In support of NASA's spaceflight operations he has written books on Rendezvous Flight Procedures, on Mission Control Center console operations, and on the history of orbital rendezvous. In honor of his pioneering work on developing and documenting these space shuttle rendezvous techniques, he was named by the NASA-Area "Association of Technical Societies" as their 1984 "Technical Person of the Year". In 1997 he received the "Sustained Superior Performance" award for coordinating the design of the complex first Space Station assembly mission.

He has written ten books and more than a thousand magazine and newspaper articles on all aspects of space flight. Among these books are: Red Star in Orbit, generally considered the best inside portrait of the history of Soviet space activities through 1981; New Earths, the world's first non-fiction treatment of the far-out futuristic topic of "terraforming" or "planetary engineering"; Pioneering Space (with his wife as co-author), a broad and insightful view of the human side of the spaceflight experience; The New Race for Space, which described the development and prospects for closer US/Russian space flight cooperation; and Uncovering Soviet Disasters, a penetrating analysis of secrecy and technological shortcomings in the former USSR which received wide praise around the world and even in post-glasnost Moscow. His 1999 book, Space Power Theory, commissioned by the US Space Command, described how the United States has achieved space superiority and how it can exploit and maintain it into the next century. He also contributes key articles on space topics to several leading encyclopedias and annual reference books. His latest book, Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the US/Russian Space Alliance, described the development of the International Space Station and the actual role the Russians played in making it possible, in somewhat less flattering terms than official NASA histories.

Oberg is widely regarded as a world authority on the Russian and Chinese space programs. He has several times been invited to testify before Congress about the problems facing the Russian space industry and the prospects for China in space, and regularly lectures at government 'think tanks' on these themes. He is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and in 1993 was invited to become the first foreign member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics. He is also on the editorial board of Air & Space magazine, sponsored by the Smithsonian's "National Air and Space Museum", and of SPECTRUM, the monthly magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and writes a monthly column on upcoming space missions for Astronomy magazine. He provides expert assessment and forecasts of Russian space industrial and technological elements for corporate and government clients.

Prior to his association with NBC News, Mr. Oberg had been the space consultant for ABC News and several foreign networks. He has also been the space correspondent for United Press International, and has written columns for space Internet sites from space.com to Galaxy Online to msnbc.com. His book Red Star in Orbit was the basis of a 1991 PBS NOVA mini-series devoted to new revelations about the history of the Russian cosmonaut program, and was optioned to HBO for a made-for-TV movie. He was consultant and catalog contributor to the two auctions of Russian space memorabilia held by Sotheby's in New York, to the sale of a flown Vostok spacecraft by Kaller's America Gallery of NY, and has been a science display advisor to many planetariums, galleries, and museums.

Roger F. Pajak is a Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance (CSNR) of the Nation Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Prior to joining CSNR, he was Senior Counter Intelligence Advisor for Russia with NRO’s Office of Security and Counter Intelligence.

Dr. Pajak was formerly National Counterintelligence Officer for Russia and the Middle East in the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. He earlier served as National Security Advisor for Russia and the Middle East to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, as well as the Secretary’s Principal Advisor for Counterterrorism and International Organized Crime.

A widely published and recognized authority on Russian and Middle East security affairs, foreign policy, and nuclear proliferation, Dr. Pajak was a Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in 1988-1989. He is an Adjunct Fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Virginia, and Visiting lecturer at the Joint Military Intelligence College. Dr. Pajak has lectured extensively overseas on behalf of the U.S. Department of State and in the U.S. at the Senior Military Colleges, the Military Academies, the Foreign Service Institute, and the FBI Academy.

Dr. Pajak received a Bachelor’s Degree in International Affairs from Michigan State University, a Master’s Degree in Russian Area Studies from Harvard University, and a Doctorate in International Relations and Russian Area Studies from American University. He also is a graduate of the National War College, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Colonel (Ret.) in Military Intelligence in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Constance Penley is a professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media,Cultural Studies. Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender. Her artistic collaborations include Primetime Art by the GALA Committee as seen on Melrose Place and Biospheria: An Environmental Opera . She earned her Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California-Berkeley and is a recipient of the Kenneth Burke Prize in Rhetorical Studies from Penn
State.

Emily S. Rosenberg is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Two of her books, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 and Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930, deal with the intersections of culture and economics in U.S. international relations. Her most recent book, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (also translated into Japanese), examines the issue of collective historical memory in a media age. She is a coauthor of Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (5th ed., 2007). She has served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR); an editor of the Oxford Companion to United States History; a Board member of the Organization of American Historians; and co-edits the “American Encounters, Global Interactions” book series for Duke University Press.

Asif A. Siddiqi is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University in New York. He specializes in the social and cultural history of technology and modern Russian history. His forthcoming book, The Rockets’ Red Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) is the first archive-based study on the social, cultural, and technological forces that made possible Sputnik.

Paul Smith is a professor of cultural studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kent. Professor Smith has authored, edited, or contributed to numerous publications, including Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota, 1993), Men in Feminism (Ed. with Alice Jardine, Methuen, 1987), "Tommy Hilfiger in the Age of Mass Customization" (in No Sweat, ed. Andrew Ross, Verso, 1997), 249-262), Madonnarama: On "Sex" and Popular Culture (Ed. with Lisa Frank, Cleis Press, 1993), and "Terminator Technology: Hollywood, History, Technology" (in Keyframes, eds. M.Tinkcom & A.Villarejo, Routledge, 2001, 333-342). In his most recent book, Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy (U. Minnesota Press, 2007), he addresses the tension between what he calls the primitive and progressive aspects of American culture.

Michael Soluri is a New York City based photographer. His work has been published in editorial magazines like Wired, BBC Horizons, GEO as well as in corporate, institutional and non-profit multi-media communications. He is a contributing photographer for Discover magazine, Space.Com and Ad Astra. Recently profiled in Photo District News for his expertise in the photography and editing of human and robotic space exploration, he has lectured at the Smithsonian Institute and the National Science Foundation.

Throughout his career, Soluri has been inspired by the aesthetics of space flight. In an attempt to discover the imaginative, he has devoted
more than thirty years researching and editing through less accessible and little known still imagery from human and robotic space exploration as well as discerning the seminal in astronomical phenomena.

A former professor of photographic studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Soluri is currently adjunct faculty at Pratt Institute. He
is co-author and picture editor of What's Out There - Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe and Cosmos - Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe. He secured Stephen Hawking to write the book's forward, which is published in 8 languages.

Soluri's current photography projects include: contributing editor for The History of Space Travel, a special edition of Discover magazine
commemorating fifty years of space flight; the documentation of project scientists and technicians with NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto
(begun 8 months before its January 2006 launch), and a presentation of this ongoing work for the New Horizons science team at the Lowell
Observatory. Soluri is also portraying the crew, key engineers, scientists and tools of SM4, the last Shuttle service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Margaret A. Weitekamp is a Curator in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. As curator of the Social and Cultural Dimensions of Spaceflight collection, she oversees over 4000 individual pieces of space memorabilia and space science fiction objects. These social and cultural products of the space age - everything from toys and games, to clothing and stamps, medals and awards, and buttons and pins, as well as comics and trading cards - round out the story about spaceflight told by the Museum's collection of space hardware and technologies.

Her book Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women In Space Program (published by the Johns Hopkins University Press) won the Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature given by the American Astronautical Society. The book reconstructs the history of a privately-funded project testing women pilots for astronaut fitness at the beginning of the space age. In addition, Weitekamp has also contributed to an edited anthology (Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky, editors) titled Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s (New York University Press, 2005).

Weitekamp won the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum Aviation/Space Writers Award in 2002 and served as an interviewer for The Infinite Journey: Eyewitness Accounts of NASA and the Age of Space (Discovery Channel Publishing, 2000). She spent the academic year 1997-1998 in residence at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Headquarters History Office in Washington, D.C. as the American Historical Association / NASA Aerospace History Fellow. She is a 1993 Mellon Fellow in the Humanities.

Weitekamp earned her B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. in History at Cornell University in 2001. Before joining the Smithsonian Institution, Weitekamp taught for three years as an Assistant Professor in the Women's Studies Program at Hobart
and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, a liberal arts college in upstate New York.