NASA s history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the Moon in 1969. But its prehistory is largely absent from the popular space-age literature. America s space agency drew together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. From Wernher von Braun fleeing the ruins of Berlin to the Mercury programme, tests of new technology by pilots such as Neil Armstrong and, in the shadow of Sputnik and an ever-cooling Cold War, the final creation of NASA, Breaking the Chains of Gravity tells the full story of NASA s roots.