A rare conversation with astronaut Scott Parazynski and the story of one of NASA’s most daring missions, the Flight of Apollo 8 are the subject of The Halli Casser-Jayne Show the podcast posted at Halli Casser-Jayne dot com.

In his compelling new memoir, THE SKY BELOW: A TRUE STORY OF SUMMITS, SPACE, AND SPEED astronaut and adventurer Scott Parazynski takes us on a rocketship paced, adrenalin-filled adventure from the dizzying heights of Mount Everest where the wind whips climbers to their death, to the solitude and expanse of outer space where he was tethered to the International Space Station by an improvised leash to make emergency repairs. While his father worked as a Boeing engineer developing the Saturn V rocket, as a young boy Parazynski traveled the earth with his parents and was educated worldwide before returning stateside to earn his medical degree before training at NASA. In THE SKY BELOW Parazynski gives readers a front row seat to his seventeen year career at NASA: his training, leading the first ever US-Russian space-walk and taking us inside the “family escort” role astronauts solemnly perform for each other when disaster strikes Columbia. The climax of his space career comes with a mission that many regard as one of the most dangerous and challenging ever performed.

The story of Apollo 8 begins in August 1968. NASA was losing the space race with Russia, with earliest estimates of going to the moon still more than two years in the future, and President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade was sure to be broken. The United States was deep into the Cold War and in the middle of a year of violence abroad and at home: Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic convention in Chicago descending into violence. Then, in the midst of all of that turmoil NASA scrapped their meticulous mission schedules and asked astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders to orbit the moon, and they would do it in just four months despite the substantial risks, the Apollo 8 mission, equal parts fearless and reckless, ingenious and impulsive – told in APOLLO 8: THE THRILLING STORY OF THE FIRST MISSION TO THE MOON written by science editor and senior writer for Time Jeffrey Kluger, also the co-author of the bestselling book APOLLO 13, on which the beloved film is based.

Astronaut, aviation history, NASA, Apollo 8, the Cold War, The Right Stuff, all on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show. For more information visit Halli Casser-Jayne dot com.