With the 50th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing this summer I have been watching every documentary and reading books on this historic event. I’ve always been fascinated by the space program (I reviewed the book American Moonshot on this blog earlier this year). Yet the best material I have found on the Apollo program and the moon landing is Nancy Atkinson’s book “Eight Years to the Moon: This History of the Apollo Missions”.
As I retired software engineer I loved the technical details in the book, especially about the early years when NASA planners were debating the best way to meet John F Kennedy’s challenge, “Land a man on the moon by the end of the decade!” Atkinson quotes one engineer during this challenging time, “You get to do things that nobody has ever thought about and nobody has every deal with. And then you also have problems like nobody else too.”
Not into technical details? The book will appeal to you, too, with many photos from the Apollo era. The oversized “coffee table” book was worth it to me just to look at all the pictures.
I learned details of the Apollo missions that I was not aware of before. For example, when Neil Armstrong piloted Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle five miles away from the original landing site, this presented a huge challenge for NASA. “In spaceflight, timing is everything. Knowing the Eagle’s exact location would establish the timing of lift-off from the Moon in order to meet with Columbia in lunar orbit,” Atkinson writes. She quotes flight dynamics officer Dave Reed in Mission Control who said to flight director Gene Kranz at the time, “We have a problem; we do not know where the hell they are.”
I relived the thrills and challenges of the Apollo missions by reading “Eight Years to the Moon”. Well worth it!
