Apollo: the Race to the Moon

"It’s a book about engineers and flight controllers who – very many of them – are the people who built the space programme, not only the hardware but the techniques and the methods. They figured out how to choreograph the precise orbital ballet of a rendezvous in space between two spacecraft that are each traveling at 17,500 miles an hour. They designed and built a space ship that could take three human beings to another celestial body and home again, re-entering the earth’s atmosphere at speeds of thousands of miles an hour with temperatures outside the vehicle climbing to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit [2,760 degrees Celsius]. These are very daunting problems. And then they had to figure out how to deal with every conceivable emergency that might come up during a flight, as we saw with Apollo 13. Apollo 13 is the best known example, and really epitomises the kind of “what if” thinking that NASA brought to these problems. Even today, many of the techniques that NASA developed for Apollo stand as monumental contributions to managing very complex operations or endeavours, involving many hundreds or even thousands of people. The Murray and Cox book is a superb account of how NASA managed a complex operation involving thousands of employees. In my work, I focus on the astronauts and their experiences, but that only tells half the story. The story of Apollo would not have been complete without this book. There were two questions that I wanted to answer. What is it like to go to the moon? And how did the trip affect the handful of human beings who made the journey? Twenty-four people have gone to the moon. Out of those 24, 12 walked on the surface. By the time I started my research, Jack Swigert from Apollo 13 had died. I spoke to all 23 of the surviving moon voyagers. I spent many, many hours talking to them about every aspect of the experience of going to the moon. I wanted to get into their heads as much as possible. When I wrote the book I really wanted it to read like a historical novel. I wanted it to transport the reader along with the astronauts, as if you could be a stowaway on those flights. For now there is still an astronaut corps that is active, and training for missions using the Russian Soyuz capsule as transportation to and from the International Space Station. At the same time, I’m sure that some of the astronauts are overseeing or getting ready for this transition to using private companies to transport people to and from the space station. It’s an uncertain time but a very exciting time. Just because the space shuttle is coming to an end doesn’t mean the space programme is coming to an end."