A Man on the Moon

"The Apollo programme was designed in America in the early 60s to deliver President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth. They went further than that and landed 12 men on the Moon and returned them safely to the Earth. The program came off the back of America’s first human spaceflight program, in the very early 1960s, which was called Mercury. This was a single-seater spacecraft that could do very simple things, like get into space and came straight back again, without even orbiting the Earth. The first flight, which Alan Shepherd took, did just that. Then, eventually, they got to orbit the Earth with John Glenn’s flight—a period covered in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff . The Gemini program that followed was designed to work out, ‘How long could you live above the atmosphere?’ Because it’s going to take a week or ten days to get to the Moon and back. Also, how could you bring two spacecraft together and connect them—called orbital Rendezvous? Because you would need to do that. This was all part of Apollo, technically, which Andrew Chaikin writes about. The architecture of Apollo comprised these tiny spacecrafts that would undock from each other, and one would go down to the surface of the Moon and come back. Andrew Chaikin writes about all the difficulty of trying to invent all of this stuff at that time. He’s a brilliant writer and journalist. He took the time, back in the early 1990s, to go around and interview as many of the key players—including the astronauts themselves—who turned this dream into a reality. That, to me, is what makes A Man on the Moon the really definitive biography of Apollo, because many of those people, sadly, have died now. He has this ultimate record of what it was all about and what it meant to those that did it. That’s why I like this book. The story arc of Apollo has triumph and tragedy built into it. The loss of any lives is desperately sad, and in fact many more astronauts were killed than just those three. They were all training and flying all over the country and there were plane crashes and accidents in the air. It was a hazardous and difficult job. Chaikin begins with a tragedy and all good storytellers know the value of that—because then the odds are stacked against you succeeding and it makes the challenge of the story more powerful. He tells it very well."

"It’s a series of interviews with all the astronauts that have been to the moon. Basically, after 1972 and the Apollo 13 expedition everybody lost interest. After Armstrong and Aldrin nobody could even remember the names of the others. So Chaikin, who’s a journalist, thought somebody had better go round and interview them all before they die. So he did, apart from Armstrong, who wouldn’t speak to anybody. He just knew what had happened to the first man who flew the Atlantic, Lindbergh – how his life had been destroyed by the celebrity. So while all the other astronauts had breakdowns, Armstrong, the first man to set foot on another world, just decided to live an ordinary life. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Chaikin interviewed the rest, and brings back the excitement of the Apollo programme. But one of the interesting things about it is how boring all the astronauts are. I mean they actually sent the most boring people to the most boring locations on the moon. And they did that on purpose. Boring people because they would react in predictable ways – unimaginative fighter pilots who would do the right thing in dangerous circumstances. And the most boring locations because your mobile phone has more technological power than the thing they touched down in. It’s the size of a wardrobe. The reason why Armstrong was the first out was because he was closest to the door."

"Man on the Moon is a fantastic book. I had so many people recommend it to me by the time I met and became friends with the author, Andy Chaikin. So I decided, I’ve got to sit down and read this book. The thing is, it’s huge – almost 700 pages. But I could not put it down when I started reading it. Andy just tells such a good story. It’s a history of the Apollo missions, telling why we went to the moon, what happened when we got there, and why we stopped going after Apollo 17. The Tom Hanks HBO miniseries From The Earth to the Moon is based on this book. I’ve debunked the idea that the moon landings were fake I don’t even know how many times over the years. I became a bit jaded. Reading this book lit the fire under me again and made me realise that telling the true story of one of the greatest adventures mankind has ever undertaken is worth doing. Some are fun to believe in. Some seem to make sense when you first hear them – like the idea that the moon looks big when it’s setting on the horizon because the air acts like a lens. That’s not true at all. In fact, the moon looks squishier when it’s setting. Other ones, like conspiracy theories that NASA faked the moon landing, are more difficult to comprehend why people buy into them, other than the fact that conspiracies do exist and many of us have a mistrust of government. When you read the moon landing myth sites, they show you pictures that say: why aren’t the shadows pointing in the same direction? Why aren’t there stars in the sky? You become sceptical but it turns out the shadows are pointing in the same direction, it’s just perspective that makes them look like they’re not. And you can’t see the stars in the sky because when they were taking photographs they were brightly lighting the lunar landscape, so the stars just don’t show up. You can show step-by-step that all of these arguments are wrong, but they still bamboozle people. The first astronomical object you get to when you leave the Earth’s atmosphere is the moon. It is the closest cosmic neighbour we have, and you can see it with your naked eye. You can even see features on it, such as the scars of gigantic impacts. When Galileo looked at the moon 400 years ago he could see that it wasn’t a smooth world, and that the blue spots on it weren’t oceans but craters. When you look at it with a big telescope today, you can see thousands upon thousands of impacts. Man on the Moon gives you profound insight into the history of the Earth. The fact that the moon – which is a quarter of the size of our planet – is covered in craters from impact means that the Earth must have been hit even more. We’re bigger, we have more gravity, so we would have pulled in more comets and asteroids. The Earth’s history must have been profoundly shaped by impacts, yet we don’t see any trace of them. That’s because unlike the moon, the Earth undergoes erosion, there’s been continental drift, there’s water, wind and whipping air. Over millions and millions of years those craters have mostly been swept off the Earth. Yet the history of our planet was literally shaped by impacts; that’s the lesson of the moon. If you have enough money you can go into space as a tourist now. Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s company, is already selling tickets for people to go into space, 62 miles above sea level. Those flights may start as early as this year. They’ve already sold quite a few tickets. So you have to be able to afford it, but it’s possible. There are also companies who are talking about building inflatable habitats that orbit the Earth, and a couple of these have already been tested. So space hotels may exist not far in the future. It’s never going to be easy to get into space, but it will happen far more often and you will be seeing advertisements for honeymoons in space."