Ivan Amato

My “latest” book–an institutional history of a lesser known player in the origin and evolution of the Space Age–has finally become available in 2022. It should’ve been published in 2015, but a security check and a saga intervened. I’m grateful that it has finally launched. Books are available at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Taking Technology Higher: The Naval Center for Space Technology and the Ascent of the Space Age chronicles for a wide audience a little known but consequential player, the Naval Center for Space Technology (NCST), in the advent and maturation of the Space Age and the U.S. space program. It’s a tale that spans from the birth of the Space Age, through the fear and paranoia of the Cold War, and onward toward the quest for ubiquitous, global-scale detection of modern-day security threats.

Here is a pdf of the book. I hope you enjoy it.

Super Vision: A new View of Nature. Published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in November 2003, this book is a celebration of the stunning and informative ways that instrumentation renders visible so much of the world that normally is indiscernible to our unassisted senses.

Science: Pathways of Discovery. This book, published in 2002 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is a repackaging of a millennial series of essays that I edited for Science  throughout the year 2000.

Pushing the Horizon: Seventy-Five Years of High Stakes Science and Technology at the Naval Research Laboratory. The book was published by the Naval Research Laboratory, via the Government Printing Office, in June 1998.

Stuff: the materials the world is made of.  This, my first book, was released in March 1997 by Basic Books and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for that year.