teamfreak16's Full Review: Andrew Chaikin - A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of...
Many still consider it man’s greatest achievement. In 1962, when John F. Kennedy promised that by the end of the decade the United States would land on the moon, people were skeptical. After all, Alan Shepard had just recently spent a scant 15 minutes in space. And that was it. The moon seemed a long, long way off, and yet NASA rose to Kennedy’s challenge, and with a couple exceptions, the Apollo program was a rousing success. Author Andrew Chaikin’s (The New Solar System) 1994 book A Man on the Moon tells the Apollo story, and served as the basis for HBO’s miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
When Kennedy issued his edict to a packed house at Texas’ Rice Stadium, America was losing the space race to the Soviets, and the President had recently suffered a setback with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Tensions in Vietnam were rising. Yet, to hear Kennedy tell it, we were going to the moon, sooner than later.
The moon? Pshhhhhaw yeah, right.
But NASA accepted Kennedy’s promise and began a round-the-clock effort to bring his wish to fruition.
It might seem so, but Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t just strap themselves into a rocket and head off to the moon one day. The Apollo program featured lots and lots of testing and training before 12 total men could set foot on the barren moonscape. Chaikin’s book chronicles Apollo from the disaster that was Apollo 1 (where Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White perished in a cockpit fire during a launch pad test,) to the final moonwalks of Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt on Apollo 17.
At first glance, A Man on the Moon seems aimed at geeks and nerds—it is, after all, about space travel. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Chaikin’s book should appeal to anyone interested in human drama—it’s been a long time since I read a book that literally gave me goose bumps. It makes a for fascinating read as the Apollo program unfolds within its pages.
While dealing out historical and scientific data (he turns physics and geology into something that even I can understand,) Chaikin captures his seemingly larger-than-life cast of characters as they really were. The Apollo astronauts, for all their big brass balls and hotshot reputations (these were, after all, pilots who dared venture into the great unknown knowing that they might not come back) were actually, for the most part, distant, humble men.
There was no “astronauts club,” with the fellows all hanging out together as part of some exclusive fraternity. In fact, with a couple of exceptions, most of the three man crews rarely even became close friends. Hell, the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, was infamous for keeping his peers at arms length. There was also a healthy dose of rivalry within the corps as the spacemen jockeyed for spots on upcoming missions.
Even so, Chaikin reveals a few quirks and senses of humor. Apollo 14’s Ed Mitchell, for instance, conducted private ESP experiments during the flight, attempting to beam his thoughts back to recipients back home. And Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad had a giant baseball cap made to fit over his space helmet, hoping to get a laugh from his television audience, wearing it as he bounded through the moon dust. He abandoned his plan only after engineers could not find a way to stow the oversized hat on board his lunar module.
One would think that going to the moon and back would have changed the men that went there, but that wasn’t the case. If anything, their journeys only served to cement their personalities. Jim Irwin, for instance, was already a man of God before he left. Upon his return, he became even more devout and started his own ministry. Armstrong became more private and reclusive than he was prior to leaving. More than anything else, most of the astronauts found that their trips to the moon mainly served to open up new business or political opportunities; other than that, the newly famous men changed very little.
Apollo wasn’t without its mishaps, however, and Chaikin documents them here. The book begins with the Apollo 1 disaster, and covers, in detail, Apollo 13 (the infamous “Houston, we’ve had a problem” mission.) Even successful missions weren’t without danger. Lightning struck Apollo 12 shortly after liftoff and the crew came close to aborting, and Armstrong and Aldrin caused a panic back in mission control when they overshot their designated landing zone by four miles.
At 584 pages (not counting appendices and short biographies, etc.,) A Man on the Moon is a beast. You’ll have to put it down every so often just to get away and soak up what you’ve just read.
You would also think that it might drag on and on—“Oh great, another moon landing”—but each mission and moonwalk is riveting enough to capture your imagination. A Man on the Moon is a fascinating read that gets to the very essence of the human spirit. Space buffs will eat it up, but I would recommend it for anyone looking for the ultimate escape.
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