The professional literature of astronautics: not telling the story of space, but explaining how to operate there. Propulsion treatises, engineering-school manuals, reference works on launch vehicles, on satellites and their subsystems, applied orbital mechanics, space telecommunications and systems reliability.
This literature documents the moment when space stopped being a feat and became an infrastructure, and its evolution follows that of the techniques themselves, from the first manuals written when everything remained to be invented to the reference works of an established industry.