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History. Science. Technology. Nonfiction. HTML: Apollo is the behind-the-scenes story of an epic achievement. Based on exhaustive research that included many exclusive interviews, Apollo tells how America went from a standing start to a landing on the moon at a speed that now seems impossible. It describes the unprecedented engineering challenges that had to be overcome to create the mammoth Saturn V and the facilities to launch it. It takes you onto the gantries at Cape Canaveral and behind the consoles of Houston's Mission Control as it relives the tragedy of the fire on Apollo 1, the first descent to the lunar surface, and the rescue of Apollo 13. A story of daring bordering on recklessness on the ground and life-and-death decisions made in seconds during the flights, Apollo captures the drama of humans leaving Earth for the first time..… (more)
User reviews
Cox and Murray seem to have become interested in the history of the US manned space programme (which is well outside both their fields of study) largely by accident, and they approach it in the best tradition of American narrative non-fiction, the way books used to be written before everything had to be structured like a TV documentary. Their interest is focussed on the people who took up Kennedy's challenge and made it happen, in particular the engineers who built the launch vehicles and spacecraft, the flight operations people who made sure they completed their missions and got the crews back, and the NASA bosses who created the management structures that allowed such a colossal project to function at all. They obviously spent a lot of time talking to the people involved in Apollo, and they tell their story in a lively, fluent way. There's less about the actual engineering than I would have liked, but enough to allow readers to make sense of the story most of the time. And their account of the dynamics of the teams of scientists and engineers and the way they worked under pressure rings very true.
The book reminds us about the general questions that were raised (mostly afterwards - although they do argue that Kennedy was initially sceptical himself) about the utility and value-for-money of manned spaceflight, but it doesn't attempt to analyse these in detail: Apollo is presented, reasonably enough, as an outstanding human and technical achievement, and the interest is more in how it was done rather than why. Writing in the late 1980s, the authors obviously didn't have access to Soviet records, and they don't go into the question of whether there ever really was anyone else in the "race" to the Moon.
As always when I think about the Apollo programme, I'm astounded how they managed to do it all in feet and inches, with essentially no women engineers in the team at all, and with computers that had a fraction of the processing power of the modern washing-machine. It must all have been down to the pens in their shirt-pockets...
This story will pull you in and make you feel part of the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century.