Christopher Riley's Reading List

"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."

"That’s right, it’s a kind of road trip that Smith writes about. He’s another very charismatic writer. He writes beautifully and it’s very readable. The words in the story just leap off the page into your mind and memory. It’s a wonderful counter to Andrew Chaikin’s book because it’s written a couple of decades later. It’s about tracking down these 12 men who had this extraordinarily unique and rare experience of standing on another world, 400,000 kilometers from Earth, looking back at their home planet. Andrew Smith is interested in what that odd experience did to them and how they coped with it in the years after they came back. It’s a common misconception that everyone who stood on the Moon went mad when they when they came back to Earth. That’s just not true. There were multiple personality types that went to the Moon. There were incredible alpha male commanders who were very driven, in the years after they came back, to become captains of industry and follow very particular careers. Then there were those far more unconventional figures that he met as well. All the Lunar Module pilots had very little to do on the way back, because they’d left their spaceships on the Moon. Their job was done, and they were able to reflect more profoundly on the meaning of what they had just achieved. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As a result, when they came back, they thought more deeply about what it meant to be them, and what they wanted to do with the years ahead. Rather than pursue more conventional careers, they all went into these rather alternative lifestyles and life plans that took them in very interesting directions. For example, Buzz Aldrin has campaigned tirelessly for a return of human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit—back to the Moon and on to Mars. Alan Bean, who followed him, became a painter. Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to study consciousness—decades before consciousness was a respectable field of study. Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin found God more vociferously than they had before. They founded their own ministries and in the case of Charlie Duke, still preach the message of God and Jesus to this day. Both of them were religious already, but Apollo freed them up to be more themselves. As it did with everybody. The last Lunar Module Pilot, Harrison Schmitt, went into politics and became a US Senator, which is another pretty odd career. Smith goes around America, mostly, tracking down these people and writing very perceptively—from a psychiatrist’s perspective almost—about how the Moon changed these people. He draws some really lovely conclusions that are universal truths about all of us, about what makes us us , and what holds us back. So I love Moondust for that reason. What comes out of his book—and others have written about this as well—is that once you’ve set yourself some incredible career goal and you’ve achieved it in this amazing way, what do you do as an encore? What’s next? Many of them didn’t realize this for years afterwards, because it wasn’t obvious, but it freed them up to be who they really were. We all wear masks in our lives, whether it’s in a relationship or at work. We are someone else when we are in these environments, because we are playing a role that we think we have to play to get on or to do what we have to do. But once we are freed up from that, only then can our wings properly unfurl and we can properly fly. That, I think, is what comes out of Andrew Smith’s book."

"Neil Armstrong stands apart from others in an even greater way. You’ve got a little pyramid of 12 people, some of them more famous than others, and some superstars, like Buzz. Then, even above them, you have the very first human being who landed his spacecraft on the Moon, put on his suit and climbed down onto the surface, laying the first footprint on another world. That has only happened once in the 4.6 billion years of the history of Earth and the 3.8 billion years of history of life on Earth. Neil Armstrong is as significant as the first semi-amphibious fish that slithered out from the ocean and onto dry land and took a gulp of air. That moment in evolution and the first man on the Moon are dots that you can join up in a vision which leads, eventually (hopefully), to a space-faring civilization that carries us back to the Moon and on to Mars and makes us bi-planetary. That all begins with Neil. “Neil Armstrong is as significant as the first semi-amphibious fish that slithered out from the ocean and onto dry land” First Man by James Hansen is this wonderfully detailed portrait of Neil. It’s a very, very thorough insight into who this man was. It’s not for the faint-hearted—there is a lot of detail—but I have a soft spot for this book. I made a biopic of Neil for the BBC in 2012, after he died, with all his friends and family. It was a wonderful privilege to be able to do that and I used James’s book for a lot of the research. Neil was a reserved, quiet man. He didn’t like publicity, he didn’t like celebrity, he certainly didn’t like having the spotlight of Apollo on him and his shoulders. He was always the first to acknowledge all the work that other people had done and the last to ever admit that he’d done anything significant. That made him an extraordinarily humble and worthy human being to be that that ‘first man,’ as James calls his book. No, he didn’t put any value on celebrity . For him, it was a vacuous, hollow and worthless word. All he was interested in was how he was going to get to the Moon—the engineering, the mechanics, the test piloting element of landing there for the first time. In one of the press conferences just before he went, he was asked what he wanted to take with him, because they were all taking personal items of some sentimental value. But all he wanted to take was more fuel. That says everything about Neil. He was a devoted, highly accomplished and supreme aviator, which is why he got to where he did. More fuel was absolutely the right answer, and that comes across—it oozes out of the pages of James’s book. Neil remained in the field that he loved, which was aerospace engineering. He left NASA and took up an academic position, which gave him the freedom to think and write and teach. He continued to fly gliders up until his death in 2012. So flights remained in his blood. He just adored that sensation of being airborne. He famously had a pilot’s license before he had a driver’s license. He thought in three dimensions. That’s what made him the great aviator that he ended up being. “Neil Armstrong famously had a pilot’s license before he had a driver’s license” Of course, being who he was, he would endlessly get asked to come here and open that and give talks and appear on TV and in films. He would accept quite a few of those requests, but because he got so many, it appeared that he was rejecting most of them. He had to, because there weren’t enough hours in the day. But that’s where this perception, that he became reclusive and very private and withdrawn, comes from. The truth was he was out there every week, talking about something and trying to inspire someone. That’s a fact."

"The reason I put this down is that all of the other books and the film that I’ve chosen are largely about the astronauts, and you’ve got to remember that honouring Kennedy’s challenge of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth required an enormous effort. It was the work of 400,000 people for a decade, so four million human years of work went into solving the elaborate daisy-chain of engineering challenges that allowed you to do this journey to the surface of the Moon, collect some rocks, explore, and come back. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Our Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual —which it’s jokingly called—is really an attempt to shine a spotlight on those 400,000 people and the effort that they went to. I picked out a handful of engineers—many of whom I’ve interviewed over the years for other projects—to try and communicate something of a) the immensity of the challenge, b) the ingenuity that goes into solving some of those problems, and c) the tenacity to never ever to give up. That is, for me, what Apollo really is. It’s this lesson in setting yourself impossible challenges and then managing to achieve them. That’s something that we all need to bear in mind as we embark on the environmental challenges we face today. It’s a very accessible story of the engineering. Although the title might suggest otherwise, it’s not an owners’ workshop manual: I’m not trying to teach you how to take your Saturn V apart and fix the F1 engine. It’s purely the engineering stories. It’s a very readable account and an inspiring one, I think, of what humans can do when they put their minds to it. You can see the Great Wall from Earth’s orbit—though not from the Moon, of course. The thing about Apollo’s computing power is this was the 1960s. It was just the birth of digital computing. In those days, computers filled entire rooms or even buildings, and part of Apollo’s great challenge was shrinking the computer from something that large and power-hungry down to something the size of a couple of shoe boxes that you could run off a battery and put in a spacecraft to help you navigate somewhere beyond Earth, where you couldn’t use a compass anymore. This computer was crude by today’s standards, but totally awesome in terms of its time and the ingenuity that had gone into it. We’re all spoiled today by the computing power that we thrive on. We barely consider it, because we’re so used to it. It’s invisible. It’s buried in the phones in our pocket. But yes, it’s way more powerful than anything that they had at their disposal back then."