“A Man on the Moon: One Giant Leap/The Odyssey Continues/Lunar Explorers”, by Andrew Chaikin

 

960 pages, Time Life Books, ISBN-13: 978-0783556796

The Apollo Program (or Project Apollo, if you like) was the American human spaceflight program carried out by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) which succeeded in landing the first humans on the Moon from 1969 to 1972. It was first conceived during the Eisenhower Administration as a three-person spacecraft, as opposed to the one-person Mercury Program, which put the first Americans into space. This is easily forgotten, as the Apollo Program was later dedicated to the memory of President Kennedy; in his address to Congress on May 25^th, 1961, he had made it a goal of NASA of “landing a man on the Moon by the end of this decade and returning him safely to the Earth”.

For anyone interested in the Apollo Program, Andrew Chaikin’s three-part work A Man on the Moon: One Giant Leap/The Odyssey Continues/Lunar Explorers, is a must-have addition to your library. As a special edition put out by Time Life Books, you can bet that it is a lavish and detailed as these things always are. The photographs are epic, the descriptions are crisp and the format is, in a word, beautiful. But its more than just the machines, for the men behind them – yes, they are mostly men; and white, too – come to life, as well, as the pressure to land a man on the moon and then return him safely wore on everybody. But damnit, that Yankee can-do attitude and know-how got the job done.

As hard as it may be to believe, Chaikin is the only author to interview twelve of the Apollo astronauts about this landmark program. In so many ways these men – again, all men and all white. Deal. – are humanized, after NASA propaganda did so much to turn them into larger than life heroes. Granted, NASA had a program to sell, not only to the public at large, but also to Congress, and so they had to be inflated somewhat. While it cannot be denied that these men were hardly average, to read their thoughts about Apollo – the selection process, the training program, their moonwalking peers, and naturally, what it was like to be in the select fraternity of Men Who Walked on the Friggin’ Moon – is a revelation.

But a book about the Apollo Program must needs delve into every aspect of the Moon Landings, from its inception to its sad cancellation more than a decade later. Chaikin explores the politics, the science and technology, the personalities of the astronauts and others, the exhilaration of the experience of flying in space and landing on the Moon, and does so with a simple, direct, forthright relating of the facts which, nevertheless, conveys so much raw emotion and spirit, rather in the manner of the moonshot itself. I challenge you to read this book and not be inspired by fantasies of spaceflight. A Man on the Moon is as complete a record of how and why the United States at long last saw fit to travel to an alien world.

And what for? For the answer to that question, we turn once more to Kennedy (and his primo speechwriters): on September 12^th, 1962, in Houston, TX, Kennedy gave the reason why human beings could and should do anything: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. Would that current and future generations of Americans had the same attitude, today and tomorrow.