A memoir of a young man's dream of space flight, Bending Atmospheres is a dazzling adventure recounting daring, heroic professionals learning to work at undersea pressures to 1,000 feet sea water and in the vacuum of orbital space traveling at 18,000 miles an hour. Readers are taken through the early development of deep diving TRI-MIX, Nitrox and Neon diving gas mixtures and decompression tables, to early diving in the treacherous North Sea and methods used to train astronauts for space walks to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.