Humans in space were first written about in the future tense (orbital stations and flights to come) before the test pilots, then the first crews, invented a new literature: the first-hand account. Astronaut and cosmonaut memoirs, from every era and every programme, with what they say and what their times made them leave unsaid.
Around these voices, a whole corpus documents the material reality of human spaceflight, the part you don't see in archive footage: selection and training, space medicine, life on board, the return. From the capsules to the stations and long-duration flights, the genre follows the history of human spaceflight itself.
It is the most embodied theme of the bibliography: you hear the actors' own words, with their period certainties and their silences. Each entry tells you what to know before reading.