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Summary
Summary
The remarkable story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic mission to reach the moon.
President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel.
When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy's historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience--with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than U.S. astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send 24 astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.
More than fifty years later, One Giant Leap is the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind's greatest achievements. It's a story filled with surprises--from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today.
Charles Fishman introduces readers to the men and women who had to solve 10,000 problems before astronauts could reach the Moon. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. One Giant Leap is the captivating story of men and women charged with changing the world as we knew it--their leaders, their triumphs, their near disasters, all of which led to arguably the greatest success story, and the greatest adventure story, of the twentieth century.
Author Notes
Charles Fishman is the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller One Giant Leap , A Curious Mind (with Brian Grazer), The Wal-Mart Effect , and The Big Thirst . He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business journalism.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Astronauts take a back seat to politicians, project managers, engineers, and the marvelous machines they created in this engrossing history of the moon landings. Journalist Fishman (The Wal-Mart Effect) presents a loose-jointed, episodic account of the Apollo program, from President Kennedy's 1961 promise to put men on the moon to the 1969 Apollo 11 landing. The project initially seemed impossible with existing technology (and pointless to naysayers who dubbed it a "moondoggle") but succeeded through largely unsung breakthroughs that Fishman describes with inquisitive relish: the small, underpowered (at "0.000002 percent of the computing capacity of the phone in your pocket"), but brilliant Apollo Guidance Computer, literally hand-woven from wire and magnets; the painstaking, counterintuitive procedures for orbital rendezvous of spaceships, which require slowing down to catch up; the hidden metal frame that made an American flag seem to ripple in a phantom moon-breeze. The author also explores the organizational prowess and maniacal attention to detail required of Apollo's 400,000-plus workers to ensure that the gadgetry worked near perfectly in space, where any glitch could spell disaster. Fishman's knack for explaining science and engineering and his infectious enthusiasm for Apollo's can-do wizardry make for a fascinating portrait of a technological heroic age. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Fishman eschews a chronological approach to the Apollo moon missions in favor of a focus on technical problems, momentous or trivial, spotlighting the engineers or technicians who tackled them. Obscure even to space history enthusiasts, Jack Kinzler and Thomas Moser receive credit from Fishman for what became Apollo's iconic images, astronauts saluting the American flag. They realized that NASA had no plan to take flags to the moon, perhaps because the space agency was so absorbed by such crucial challenges as designing reliable rockets, spacecraft, and computers. After delving into a fundamental decision to rendezvous spacecraft in lunar, not Earth, orbit, Fishman details the problems involved in developing Apollo's computers. Enter Bill Tindall, whose success in fixing them earns Fishman's praise as The Man Who Saved Apollo. Tindall's trouble-shooting influence extended to his initiating contingency plans for failure of a service module engine, as would happen on Apollo 13. Addressing the scale and expense of Apollo, Fishman concludes with an emphatic affirmation of its worth in a work that will reward readers with new angles on a familiar story.--Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE FOOTPRINTS ARE STILL THERE, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong's boots, caked into dust. There's no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don't blow away and they don't wash away and there's no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they're so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they'll last for tens of millions of years. This summer marks half a century since Armstrong first walked on the moon, though cosmologically, that was a mere snap of the fingers ago. "Man on the moon!" cried Walter Cronkite on CBS television news, gasping, while the world watched, rapt. Kids away at summer camp were marched from their tents deep in the woods to mess halls to plop down in front of a little screen, while camp counselors tinkered with rabbit-ear antennas. "That's one small step for man," Armstrong said, immortally, as he stepped off the ladder of the Lunar Module on July 20,1969, "one giant leap for mankind." And then Armstrong pressed his gray-and-white boot into the dust, and left that first trace. But what really lasts from that moment? What was the mission for? And what did it leave behind, here on Earth? Fifty years later, floods made more frequent by the changing of the climate have begun to wash away the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, from which Apollo 11 was launched (NASA has been shipping in sand to try to shore up devastated dunes), and hurricanes worsened by the rising of the seas threaten the site of Apollo lls mission control, the Johnson Space Center in Texas. Houston, we have a problem. Much of the beauty, the wonder and the earthshaking awe of the expedition to the moon is best remembered in photographs taken by American astronauts on custommade Swedish cameras called Hasselblads, first used on the Mercury 8, an Earth-orbiting mission, in 1962. As the photographer and curator Deborah Ireland explains in HASSELBLAD AND THE MOON LANDING (Ammonite, $14.95), the three astronauts on Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, had to share two Hasselblads. "Oh, golly, let me have that camera back," Aldrin said as they neared the moon. The iconic photograph of the single footprint shows the mark of Aldrin's boot, not Armstrong's, and it was Aldrin who took the picture of Armstrong right after he planted the American flag, near the base they named Tranquility. Collins remained on the Command/Service Module, orbiting. "What are you doing, Mike? What are you taking pictures of?" Armstrong asked Collins on the journey back to Earth, as they stared back at the face of the moon. "Oh, I don't know," Collins answered. "Wasting film, I guess." It was not wasted. The photographs remain as astounding as ever. Still, before July of 1969, a lot of critics thought the whole program was a waste. At no point before Apollo 11 actually landed on the moon did a majority of the American public support the mission, as the retired NASA historian Roger Launius reports in APOLLO'S LEGACY: Perspectives on the Moon Landing (Smithsonian, $27.95). It cost $25.4 billion ($180 billion in today's money), and, in the 1960s, was the line item on which the United States government spent the most money, aside from Vietnam. "No bucks, no Buck Rogers," NASA officials got in the habit of telling Congress. Notwithstanding the undisputed ingenuity of its scientists and engineers and the undaunted courage of its astronauts, critics still called it a "moondoggle." But after the mind-blowing, Tang-selling, moon-boot trendsetting triumph of the landing, both the general indifference and the specific skepticism were forgotten. They're forgotten in some of these new books, too, most of which take the form of one kind of boosterism or another. "Man has always gone where he has been able to go," Collins told a joint session of Congress, in September 1969, and those are the lines with which James Donovan chooses to end SHOOT FOR THE MOON: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 (Little, Brown, $30). Donovan's earlier books are swaggering accounts of the Alamo, "The Blood of Heroes," and of Custer's last stand, "A Terrible Glory," in which men conquer, even in defeat, and that's the view he takes of Apollo, too, a vantage that allows no room for, say, women. "If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying at home," said Barbara Cernan, the wife of Gene Cernan, a member of the crew of Apollo 10 and commander of Apollo 17. You can read about her in Lily Koppel's 2013 book "The Astronauts' Wives Club," but you won't find her in Donovan's account. Nor will you find a word about the record-breaking pilot Jerrie Cobb, who in 1961 became the first of 13 women to qualify to become an astronaut. NASA refused to allow them to fly, as Martha Ackmann explained in her 2003 book "The Mercury 13." Cobb fought back. "We seek, only, a place in our nation's space future without discrimination," Cobb said before a House investigation, in 1962. In 1998, when she was 67, she said, "I would give my life to fly in space, I really would." She died this spring, at the age of 88. Her footprints are not on the moon. The moon landing is a matter of public memory, which is another way of saying that it's contested history. In 1971, Collins became the director of the Smithsonian's National Air Museum, overseeing the addition of "Space" to its name in 1976, and he provides the introduction to APOLLO TO THE MOON: A History in 50 Objects (National Geographic, $35), by the curator Teasel Muir-Harmony. Included is an artifact borrowed from the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History, a tin can plastered with a photograph of the Reverends Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, King's successor as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The S.C.L.C. used that sort of can to collect donations at rallies, like the one Abernathy led at the Kennedy Space Center on July 15,1969, the day before the launch of Apollo 11. Abernathy carried a sign that read: "$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8." Muir-Harmony quotes Abernathy as saying, "On the eve of man's noblest venture, I am profoundly moved by the nation's achievements in space," but weirdly leaves out the meaningful part of that speech, which you can see Abernathy deliver in the opening scenes of an ambitious and affecting three-part PBS/American Experience documentary, "Chasing the Moon," scheduled to be released in July, along with an accompanying book, CHASING THE MOON: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age (Ballantine, $32), by the film's director, Robert Stone, and one of its producers, Alan Andres. "We may go on from this day to Mars and to Jupiter and even to the heavens beyond," Abernathy said, "but as long as racism, poverty and hunger and war prevail on the Earth we as a civilized nation have failed." By this measure, the last 50 years is a history of defeat heaped upon defeat. In AMERICAN MOONSHOT: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race (Harper/ HarperCollins, $35), the best new study of the American mission to space, rich in research and revelation, the historian Douglas Brinkley carefully considers this and other attacks launched by civil rights activists, like the National Urban League's Whitney Young. "It will cost $35 billion to put two men on the moon," Young complained. "It would take $10 billion to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year. Something is wrong somewhere." But Brinkley concludes that, as a purely economic matter, the mission was worth it, given the gains that extended to matters of public health. He writes, "The technology that America reaped from the federal investment in space hardware (satellite reconnaissance, biomedical equipment, lightweight materials, water-purification systems, improved computing systems and a global search-and-rescue system) has earned its worth multiple times over." In ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon (Simon & Schuster, $29.99) Charles Fishman suggests that criticisms of the program were forgotten because in the summer of 1969, almost overnight, Apollo came to stand for the very opposite of Vietnam: one the nation at its best, the other the nation at its worst. Fishman isn't especially interested in this point; instead, most of his book is a long argument that the mission was worth it, for reasons many readers will wonder at. "The race to the moon didn't usher in the Space Age," he insists, "it ushered in the Digital Age." He points, specifically, to the development of integrated circuits and real-time computing. But there's something else, something bigger, that Fishman wants the shot at the moon to get credit for: "In 1961, when the race to the moon kicked off, there was no sense in popular culture of 'technology' as a force in the everyday lives of consumers as we think of it now." His argument goes like this: Apollo didn't bring us to Mars, at least not yet, but, hey, it brought you Alexa. A counterargument goes something like this: My country went to the moon and all I got was this lousy surveillance state. The race for the moon began as a race to the White House. On Oct. 4,1957, the Soviet Union launched into orbit the first satellite, Sputnik. The American public began to panic, and Democrats decided to put that panic to political use. "People will soon imagine some Russian sitting in Sputnik with a pair of binoculars and reading their mail over their shoulders," the Democratic strategist George Reedy wrote to Lyndon Baines Johnson on Oct. 17. "The issue is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party and elect you as president." Even before Sputnik, the Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy had been attacking President Eisenhower, accusing him of failing to devote adequate funds to the missile program, leading to the United States falling behind the Soviet Union in the arms race and leading to what Kennedy dubbed a "missile gap." In November 1957, Johnson, as Senate majority leader, opened Senate hearings into why the United States was lagging and warned Americans, "Soon, the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses." The environmentalist and writer Rachel Carson observed the forging of this "space age universe" with dismay. Men had been fantasizing about the "conquest of space" since before H. G. Wells, as Carson well knew. "In the pre-Sputnik days, it was easy to dismiss so much as science-fiction fantasies," Carson wrote to the woman she loved, Dorothy Freeman, in February 1958. "Now the most far-fetched schemes seem entirely possible of achievement. And man seems actually likely to take into his hands - ill prepared as he is psychologically - many of the functions of 'God.'" Johnson's hearings in part persuaded Carson to write a book that she for a long time called "Man Against the Earth," but that eventually appeared as "Silent Spring." That same year, 1958, in "The Human Condition," Hannah Arendt described the launching of Sputnik as an event in human history "second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom." Like Carson, Arendt didn't celebrate this development, described in both the American and Soviet press as marking the first "step toward escape from men's imprisonment on Earth." An escape? "Nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men's bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon," Arendt wrote, regretting the dawn of an age in which the Earth had come to be understood as a prison and space yet another place to be conquered. The year Carson set out to write "Silent Spring" and Arendt published "The Human Condition," Eisenhower established NASA, taking the notable and important caution of establishing it as a civilian agency. In a farewell address delivered on Jan. 17,1961, three days before Kennedy's inauguration, Eisenhower deplored the arms race and indicted what he dubbed the "military-industrial complex." On April 12, 1961, while Kennedy was still settling into the Oval Office, the Soviets sent a man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Five days later, Kennedy faced the first crisis of his presidency: the botched invasion of the Bay of Pigs, itself a failure of intelligence and of technology. A reporter asked him, at a news conference, "Mr. President, don't you think we should try to get to the moon before the Russians, if we can?" On May 7, Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space, on a mission known as Freedom 7, a flight that, as Brinkley points out, came just one day after the first Freedom Riders left Washington on a Greyhound bus, headed for Louisiana, to challenge Jim Crow. On May 25, in a message to Congress, Kennedy edged toward a resolve: "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Kennedy had campaigned on behalf of a New Frontier, and he meant to deliver. "Why, some say, the moon?" he asked in a stirring speech delivered at Rice University, in Houston, on Sept. 12,1962. "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people." But if the program was launched in a partisan contest, it was also, of course, a front in the Cold War. In his 1985 book, "... The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age," the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall argued that the turn from Eisenhower to Kennedy, in the aftermath of Sputnik, altered the very nature of the Cold War. "Where it had previously been a military and political struggle in which the United States need only lend aid and comfort to its allies in the front lines," McDougall wrote, "the Cold War now became total, a competition for the loyalty and trust of all peoples fought out in all arenas of social achievement, in which science textbooks and racial harmony were as much tools of foreign policy as missiles and spies." For McDougall, a conservative, the race to the moon, led by liberals, was a step on "The Road to Serfdom." "To train X thousands of engineers, to reach the moon by 19xx, to place X numbers of missiles in silos regardless of Soviet deployment, to plan for economic growth of X percent without unemployment or inflation, these were not the assignments of a free society but the dictates of a command economy." People drawn to that argument have often been drawn, too, to the study of Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi and ex-SS officer who led the American rocket program. During World War II, von Braun had overseen the production of the German V-2 rocket (the "V" was for "Vergeltung," or "vengeance") at a facility built as part of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, where the rockets were assembled by prisoners. Becoming an American citizen does not seem to have diminished von Braun's zeal for unhindered technological development. "We felt no moral scruples about the possible future abuse of our brainchild," he told The New Yorker in 1951. "Someone else would have done the job if I hadn't." (His amorality is the subject of a song recorded in 1965 by Tom Lehrer: "Don't say that he's hypocritical / Say rather that he's apolitical / 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.") The seemingly unintended consequences of developing technologies that would take men to the moon were not top of mind in the Kennedy administration, mainly because a lot of those consequences were intended: Rockets can carry weapons, too, and everything learned on the moon mission had military applications, even if NASA was a civilian agency. If not worried about the legacy of conquest and the future of war, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were concerned, very concerned, with the civil rights movement. Edward R. Murrow, who had left CBS to take a post with the Kennedy administration, urged the president to include a black astronaut on the moon mission: "I see no reason why our efforts in outer space should reflect with such fidelity the discrimination that exists on this minor planet." Edward Dwight was subsequently recruited and became the first black Air Force pilot to be trained at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. But, as is recounted in "Chasing the Moon," he was all but forced out by his commander, Chuck Yeager, who instructed the other trainees not to speak to him. Meanwhile, as Brinkley demonstrates, the White House used the space program to try to aid economic development in the Jim Crow South, especially after Johnson became president. "The White House was working hard to change the Old South," Brinkley writes, "partly by using NASA to bring high-tech jobs and a futuristic thinking to backward regions slow to abandon violent and selfdefeating prejudice." To the extent that the space program was a liberal, big-government project, it did not survive the conservative turn in American politics. "Many critical problems here on this planet make high-priority demands on our attention and our resources," Richard Nixon said in 1970 when, as president, he rejected NASA's recommendation to build a station on the moon to be used as a base for the exploration of Mars. To the extent that the space program was just another battle in the Cold War, it survives only in the Buck Rogers-era imagination of Donald Trump, with his proposed Space Force. And to the extent that the space program involved a repudiation of humanity itself, the legacy of Apollo is Alexa, and it haunts us all. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The lasting legacy of the voyage to the moon lies in the wonder of discovery, the joy of knowledge, not the geewhizzery of machinery but the wisdom of beauty and the power of humility. A single photograph, the photograph of Earth taken from space by William Anders, on Apollo 8, in 1968, served as an icon for the entire environmental movement. People who've seen the Earth from space, not in a photograph but in real life, pretty much all report the same thing. "You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply ingrained nationalisms begin to erode," Carl Sagan once described the phenomenon. "They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum." This experience, this feeling of transcendence, is so universal, among the tiny handful of people who have ever felt it, that scientists have a term for it. It's called the Overview Effect. You get a sense of the whole. Rivers look like blood. "The Earth is like a vibrant living thing," the Chinese astronaut Yang Liu thought, when he saw it. It took Alan Shepard by surprise. "If somebody'd said before the flight, Are you going to get carried away looking at the Earth from the moon?' I would have said, 'No, no way.' But yet when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the moon, I cried." The Russian astronaut Yuri Artyushkin put it this way: "It isn't important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth." That's beautiful. But here's the hitch. It's been 50 years. The waters are rising. The Earth needs guarding, and not only by people who've seen it from space. Saving the planet requires not racing to the moon again, or to Mars, but to the White House and up the steps of the Capitol, putting one foot in front of the other. Jill lepore is a professor of history at Harvard, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of many books including, recently "These Truths" and "This America."
Kirkus Review
Marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a close look at the scientific and technological challenges that needed to be overcome to make it possibleachievements that regrettably have been "mostly invisible."Rather than focus on the astronauts, journalist Fishman (The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, 2011, etc.) offers lively profiles of many tireless, imaginative, and innovative scientists, engineers, and technicians who contributed to the Apollo mission from May 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade, until July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto lunar dust. Kennedy's proposal stemmed not from an adventuresome spirit but from Cold War urgency: He wanted to beat the Russians in the space race and demonstrate the triumph of freedom over communism. However, that triumph was hardly certain; NASA, surprised by Kennedy's announcement, gave the U.S. only a 50-50 chance of success. As Fishman amply shows, the nation was woefully unprepared for space flight. Astronauts had "exactly 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience," and rockets, landing ships, navigation equipment, spacesuits, and a new generation of computers and software all had to be invented from scratch. In the 1960s, computers took up whole rooms, required huge amounts of electricity, and could not run for more than a few hours without failing. The MIT Instrumentation Lab, headed by the irrepressible Charles Draper and his brilliant colleague Bill Tindall, was charged with inventing and building flight computers, writing and wiring their software, and training astronauts in their use, and 20,00 companies contributed to the construction and assembly of the spacecraft. For eight years, 410,000 people put in 2.8 billion work hours to make the flight possible. As the author sees it, those effortslong before the innovations emanating from Silicon Valleyushered in the digital age, making technology "a tool of everyday life."A fresh, enthusiastic history of the moon mission to be read alongside Douglas Brinkley's American Moonshot and other recent books commemorating the 50th anniversary. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Arthur Schlesinger, the landing of U.S. Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969 was the most significant event of the 20th century. Fishman (The Big Thirst) skillfully tells the remarkable story of the event in his latest offering, explaining that when John F. Kennedy made his famous proclamation in a May 1961 speech that "we choose to go to the moon," the United States was completely unprepared to do so. NASA lacked the proper tools and equipment, did not know how to navigate to the moon, nor what to expect from its surface. The author illustrates how this incredible achievement was accomplished and challenges encountered along the way. Of note was the immense human capital needed to accomplish the feat; contributors included scientists and factory workers who literally wove Apollo's computer programs with copper wire. In addition, Fishman provides fascinating details about the mission, including how the moon smells and how the American flag was made to appear as though it were flying despite the moon lacking an atmosphere. VERDICT With the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, this compelling read is highly recommended for all public libraries.--Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL
Excerpts
Excerpts
One Giant Leap PREFACE The Mystery of Moondust Boy this thing sure flies nice. Pete Conrad, Apollo 12 commander at the controls of lunar module Intrepid, preparing to fly to a pinpoint landing on the Moon 1 The Moon has a smell. It has no air, but it has a smell. Each pair of Apollo astronauts to land on the Moon tramped lots of Moondust back into the lunar module--it was deep gray, fine-grained and extremely clingy--and when they unsnapped their helmets, they immediately noticed the smell. "We were aware of a new scent in the air of the cabin," said Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, "that clearly came from all the lunar material that had accumulated on and in our clothes." To Armstrong, it was "the scent of wet ashes." To his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin, it was "the smell in the air after a firecracker has gone off." All the astronauts who walked on the Moon noticed it, and many of them commented on it to Mission Control. Harrison Schmitt, the geologist who flew on Apollo 17, the last lunar landing, said after his second Moon walk, "Smells like someone's been firing a carbine in here." Almost unaccountably, no one had warned lunar module pilot Jim Irwin about the dust. When he took off his helmet inside the cramped lunar module cabin, he said, "There's a funny smell in here." His Apollo 15 crewmate Dave Scott said: "Yeah, I think that's the lunar dirt smell. Never smelled lunar dirt before, but we got most of it right here with us." 2 Moondust was a mystery that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had, in fact, thought about. Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold warned NASA that the dust had been isolated from oxygen for so long that it might well be highly chemically reactive. If too much dust was carried inside the lunar module's cabin, the moment the astronauts repressurized it with air and the dust came into contact with oxygen, it might start burning, or even cause an explosion. (Gold, who correctly predicted early on that the Moon's surface would be covered with powdery dust, also had warned NASA that the dust might be so deep that the lunar module and the astronauts themselves could sink irretrievably into it.) 3 Among the thousands of things they were keeping in mind while flying to the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin had been briefed about the very small possibility that the lunar dust could ignite. It was, said Aldrin, "the worry of a few. A late-July fireworks display on the Moon was not something advisable." Armstrong and Aldrin did their own test. They took a small sample of lunar dirt that Armstrong had scooped into a lunar sample bag and put in a pocket of his spacesuit right as he stepped onto the Moon--a contingency sample in case, for some reason, the astronauts had to leave suddenly without collecting rocks. Back inside the lunar module the astronauts opened the bag and spread the lunar soil out on top of the ascent engine. As they repressurized the cabin, they watched to see if the dirt started to smolder. "If it did, we'd stop pressurization, open the hatch and toss it out," explained Aldrin. "But nothing happened." 4 The Moondust turned out to be so clingy and so irritating that on the one night that Armstrong and Aldrin spent in the lunar module on the surface of the Moon, they slept in their helmets and gloves, in part to avoid breathing the dust floating around inside the cabin. 5 NASA had anticipated the dust, and the danger. The smell was a surprise. By the time the Moon rocks and dust got back to Earth--a total of 842 pounds from six lunar landings--the smell was gone. Scientists think the rocks and dirt were chemically reactive, as Gold theorized, but that the air and moisture the rocks were exposed to in their sample boxes on the way to Earth "pacified" them, releasing whatever smell there was to be released. Scientists who have studied the rocks and dirt and handled them and sniffed them say they have no odor at all. And no one has quite figured out what caused it, or why it was so like spent gunpowder, which is chemically nothing like Moon rock. "Very distinctive smell," said Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad. "I'll never forget. And I've never smelled it again since then." 6 In 1999, as the century was ending, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was among a group asked what the most significant human achievement of the 20th century was. In ranking the events, Schlesinger said, "I put DNA and penicillin and the computer and the microchip in the first 10 because they've transformed civilization." But in 500 years, if the United States of America still exists, most of its history will have faded to invisibility. "Pearl Harbor will be as remote as the War of the Roses," said Schlesinger. "The one thing for which this century will be remembered 500 years from now was: This was the century when we began the exploration of space." He picked the first Moon landing, Apollo 11, as the most significant event of the 20th century. 7 The leap from one small planet to its even smaller nearby Moon may well look modest when space travel has transformed the solar system--a trip no more ambitious than the way we think of a flight from Dallas to New York City today. But it is hard to argue with Schlesinger's larger observation: in the chronicle of humanity, the first missions by people from Earth through space to another planetary body are unlikely ever to be lost to history, to memory, or to storytelling. The leap to the Moon in the 1960s was an astonishing accomplishment. But why? What made it astonishing? We've lost track not just of the details; we've lost track of the plot itself. What exactly was the hard part? The answer is simple: when President John Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would go to the Moon, he was committing the nation to do something we couldn't do. We didn't have the tools, the equipment--we didn't have the rockets or the launchpads, the spacesuits or the computers or the zero-gravity food--to go to the Moon. And it isn't just that we didn't have what we would need; we didn't even know what we would need. We didn't have a list; no one in the world had a list. Indeed, our unpreparedness for the task goes a level deeper: we didn't even know how to fly to the Moon. We didn't know what course to fly to get there from here. And, as the small example of lunar dirt shows, we didn't know what we would find when we got there. Physicians worried that people wouldn't be able to think in zero gravity. Mathematicians worried that we wouldn't be able to work out the math to rendezvous two spacecraft in orbit--to bring them together in space, docking them in flight both perfectly and safely. And that serious planetary scientist from Cornell worried that the lunar module would land on the Moon and sink up to its landing struts in powdery lunar dirt, trapping the space travelers. Every one of those challenges was tackled and mastered between May 1961 and July 1969. The astronauts, the nation, flew to the Moon because hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers, managers and factory workers unraveled a series of puzzles, a series of mysteries, often without knowing whether the puzzle had a good solution. In retrospect, the results are both bold and bemusing. The Apollo spacecraft ended up with what was, for its time, the smallest, fastest, and most nimble and most reliable computer in a single package anywhere in the world. That computer navigated through space and helped the astronauts operate the ship. But the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings--like the explorers of the 1700s from the deck of a ship--and cross-check their computer's navigation. The guts of the computer were stitched together by women using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: the heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and also folded by hand. The only three staff members in the country who were trained and licensed to fold and pack the Apollo parachutes were considered so indispensable that NASA officials forbade them to ever ride in the same car, to avoid their all being injured in a single accident. 8 The astronauts went to the Moon, and their skill and courage is undeniable, and also well-chronicled. But the astronauts aren't the ones who made it possible to go to the Moon. The race to the Moon in the 1960s was also a real race, motivated by the Cold War and sustained by politics. It's been only 50 years--not 500--and yet that part of the story too has faded. One of the ribbons of magic running through the Apollo missions is that an all-out effort born from bitter rivalry ended up uniting the world in awe and joy and appreciation in a way it had never been united before and has never been united since. The mission to land astronauts on the Moon is all the more compelling because it was part of a tumultuous decade of transformation, tragedy, and division in the United States. Civil rights protesters, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, marched on Cape Kennedy on the eve of the launch of Apollo 11. In that way, the story of Apollo holds echoes and lessons for our own era. A nation determined to accomplish something big and worthwhile can do it, even when the goal seems beyond reach, even when the nation is divided over other things. Kennedy said of the Apollo mission that it was hard--that we were going to the Moon precisely because doing so was hard--and that it would "serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." And to measure the breadth of our spirit as well. 9 Putting spaceships and astronauts on the Moon, and bringing them back again, required surmounting 10,000 challenges. That extraordinary accomplishment was done by ordinary people, each, as Neil Armstrong said, taking one small step. Theirs is a story with unexpected surprises at every turn, like the moment when Armstrong, safely back inside the lunar module, took off his space helmet, took a breath, and discovered that the Moon has a smell. Excerpted from One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface: The Mystery of Moondust | p. ix |
| 1 Tranquility Base & the World We All Live In | p. 1 |
| 2 The Moon to the Rescue | p. 30 |
| 3 "The Full Speed of Freedom" | p. 61 |
| 4 The Fourth Crew Member | p. 90 |
| 5 The Man Who Saved Apollo | p. 135 |
| 6 JFK's Secret Space Tapes | p. 186 |
| 7 How Do You Fly to the Moon? | p. 227 |
| 8 NASA Almost Forgets the Flag | p. 258 |
| 9 How Apollo Really Did Change the World | p. 286 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 333 |
| Notes | p. 339 |
| Sources/Bibliography | p. 423 |
| Index | p. 447 |
