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    Challenger Park
    Unavailable
    Challenger Park
    Unavailable
    Challenger Park
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Challenger Park

    Written by Stephen Harrigan

    Narrated by Sam Freed

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it's like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today's astronauts.

    At the novel's center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.

    Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son's asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant-perhaps unreachable-her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.

    In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan's narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives-the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training-of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting-indeed a thrilling-novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 11, 2006
    ISBN9780739325193
    Unavailable
    Challenger Park

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    Reviews for Challenger Park

    3.5/5

    22 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      Husband and wife astronauts with two kids. As her marriage hits a rough spot, her son struggles with health problems and she finds herself drawn to her trainer, Lucy goes on her first shuttle mission. I was less intrigued with the characters and family drama than with the finely drawn descriptions of Clear Lake City, Texas (where most moms and dads are connected with the space industry), the astronaut training regimen, and the experience of space flight. This offered some satisfying answers for one who has oftened wondered what the life of an astronaut is really like. Interesting to contemplate how individuals respond to the challenges of training for space, and then living and working there.