Around the time I was writing the introductory chapter to The Water Cure — about an astronaut using a sextant to get the spacecraft’s position in orbit — there were astronauts trying it again in the International Space Station. It had been done on Gemini and Apollo flights, but the Apollo sextant was built-in.

I wanted to put my astronaut’s sextant on the cover of all three books in the series (so far), and if FedEx had not lost the one I ordered from India in their freight facility in Memphis, I’d have been able to take the photos I wanted and publish the books far in advance of the Christmas holiday!

See this short promotional video about the ISS sextant experiment.

https://archive.org/details/jsc2018m000418_Navigating_Space_by_the_Stars