"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue,

was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye,

and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth.

I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

- Neil Armstrong

Dan Winters grew up in the golden-age of space travel, watching the live launch of Apollo 11 with his family at home on their television set. This experience shaped him, as well as an entire generation – capturing our collective imagination as to what it means to dream a dream so big, and to dedicate ourselves to a vision so grandiose that it dazzles in its risk and the wonder of believing in it.

Winters was one of only a handful of photographers to whom NASA gave close-range access to photograph the last launches of the space shuttles Discovery (February 24, 2011), Atlantis (May 17, 2011), and Endeavour (May 11, 2011). His book, Last Launch, is a stunning photographic tribute to America’s space shuttle program. With precision and admiration, Winters’ photographs of the Discovery shuttle interiors, complex instrumentation, and mission control provide the viewer with a visual tour of the space program as a marvel of technology and human ingenuity.

As film maker Al Reinert writes in the introduction, "In the fifty-year history of human space-flight the most authentically human spacecraft, the vehicle that embodied its makers’ hopes and flaws most faithfully, was the American space shuttle…. For thirty years the shuttle had demonstrated the strength and exposed the weakness of the people who built it, and the whole shares its star-crossed legacy.”

Dan Winters is based in Los Angles, and Austin, Texas,

Links to Dan’s site, and where to buy the book are below.