Burkhard Bilger

"What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold. Karl Gönner was a schoolteacher and...

On an August morning in 1960, Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a helium balloon twenty miles above Earth, hurtling down at over 400 miles per hour. The little-known story of the men whose scientific experiments laid critical groundwork for NASA's manned space program, a decade before President Kennedy committed the nation to sending a man to the moon.