Roger D. Launius is former associate director of collections and curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. From 1990 to 2002, he served as chief historian of NASA. He has authored and coauthored numerous books, including The Smithsonian Book of Space Exploration.

Piers Bizony is the author of The Space Shuttle: Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA's First Space Plane and One Giant Leap: Apollo 11 Remembered, both from Zenith Press. He has written about science, aerospace, and cosmology for a wide variety of magazines in the United Kingdom and the United States. His previous books include 2001: Filming the Future, The Rivers of Mars, Starman (a biography of Yuri Gagarin), and Space: 50, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik.