Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon |  | Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
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Rating:  51 reviews
Sales Rank: 111933
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Media: Hardcover
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.4
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.4540973
ASIN: B002VPE85K
Publication Date: June 25, 2009
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Product Description
A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of the greatest achievements of humankind
At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon.
Rocket Men is the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution.
Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vivid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quotidian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right into the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control.
Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 51
 A must-read classic history June 28, 2009
Fred Bortz "Dr. Fred" (Pennsylvania)
17 out of 44 found this review helpful
This is a shortened version of a detailed review posted at my Science Shelf book review archive. (Guess the URL--all lower-case--and you'll be right.)
It was a time not unlike our own. A newly elected young president with a flair for inspirational rhetoric and ambitious goals challenged the United States to re-establish its world leadership.
Addressing Congress on May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy declared, "I believe that this nation, should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."
Eight years later, on July 20, 1969, a rapt world watched grainy black-and-white analog broadcast television images as Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon.
Today we watch elaborately produced retrospectives of the Apollo 11 moon landing in crisp, full-color, high-definition, digital format. But as Craig Nelson notes in his new book Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, the mythology surrounding the accomplishment is the same as it was when Armstrong took that "one small step" four decades ago.
The feat was technological, but its goal was clearly political and rooted in the Cold War....
The book is filled with in-their-own-words descriptions drawn from NASA's transcripts and oral history archive. These place readers on the scene with the astronauts, their families, and the launch and mission control teams.
Its centerpiece, of course, is the Apollo 11 mission, [but its historical insights go far beyond that one flight]....
"The standard version of the history of NASA has always been that, alarmed and deflated by Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the United States created a wholly civilian agency that, through the vital legacy of its youngest president, won the Space Race 'in peace for all mankind.' Besides the fact that almost all these assertions are either misleading or expressly false,... [t]he actual story is much richer and the achievements more profound."
[For example:] in the final days of World War II ... Operation Paper Clip ... brought Wernher von Braun and his brilliant team of ex-Nazi rocket scientists to the United States rather than Russia. Their moral ambiguity and engineering excellence are on display side-by-side. Nelson never falls into the trap of either lionizing or demonizing these problematic but important figures--including one who was eventually revealed to be a war criminal, stripped of U.S. citizenship, and deported, but not before he made important contributions to NASA rocketry....
In many ways, Nelson's task in presenting this history is as daunting as NASA's original challenge. But he rises to the occasion with meticulous research, skillful storytelling rich in detail, and a narrative arc as stimulating and disciplined as Apollo 11's own trajectory through space and history....
The book closes with a poignant and thought-provoking discussion of the biggest question faced by the astronauts and agency alike: What do you do after you've been to the moon?
Most dramatic story is Buzz Aldrin's....
Today, the future of manned spaceflight is in doubt. In the 21st century, NASA is much less willing to take risks than it was in the Apollo years.
Will the agency ever be willing to chance a human mission to Mars? ...Nelson thinks it might....
Rocket Men could have been written simply to exploit the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 for commercial success, but Craig Nelson has produced something far better. It is that rare combination of a definitive history and a "great read." When the centennial of mankind's giant leap is celebrated, readers will be hard pressed to find anything better.
Physicist and author of science books for young readers Fred Bortz dedicated his most recent title, Astrobiology (Cool Science), to "the first Earthlings on Mars, who may be reading this book."
Great book June 12, 2010
D. Adams (Terre Haute, IN United States)
0 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book shares many of the obscure and personal accounts of the Apollo astronauts and the beginnings of the program. Technical info too. It aligns historical and political events with the progress of the space race. Cool stuff!
A great read if you enjoy space exploration and especially the moon. July 14, 2009
Deborah Verlen (Chicago, IL USA)
6 out of 25 found this review helpful
If you were fascinated by the movie Apollo 13, this tale of Apollo 11 and the events that led up to the first moon walk will be just as dramatic especially since we are nearing the 40th anniversary of that feat!
The first few chapters were a bit slow, but the book picks up speed and suddenly you are transported to a time in history and science where faith, fate, luck, science, and hard work all came together for the historic landing on the moon.
The book contains a combination of meticulously researched history along with excerpts from written words of those that worked the mission whether they were astronauts, engineers, or staff. It is a fascinating glimpse into an era spearheaded by the vision of a young president, John F. Kennedy. Nelson also covers some of the history of how the United States program got to this point. This is blending of science and history that has you reliving the wonderment of those that saw that first step on the moon's surface.
Having spent a weekend at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama it was a thrill to read about some of the science experienced in the program as well as the history and science behind many of development of the rocket ships that litter the museum/academy grounds.
The book reminded me once again of how absolutely incredible this achievement was for us as a country and for us as humans.
An Essential Book for the Apollo Program July 31, 2009
Andrew Liptak (Vermont)
5 out of 27 found this review helpful
2009 is a lunar year. The film Moon was released earlier this month, to much critical success, the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing approaches in July, and fittingly, there is a new book that examines the history of Apollo 11, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson. In a wonderful PR move, the publisher, Viking, will release the book on July 13th, just days before the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11- Just enough time to read it and know exactly what's going on for that party that you'll be out, when someone will mention Apollo 11.
The thing is- this book really isn't about Apollo 11. The front of the book states this, it's a fairly comprehensive look at the mission, but this book accomplishes much more than simply looking at this extraordinary story in vivid detail: it looks at the entire sequence of events that lead up to that moment when Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. This is an incredibly important thing, I believe, because not a whole lot of people know about anything beyond those words, and that some old guy walked around on our nearest satellite. Armstrong and that other guy (Buzz Aldrin, who deserves just as much, if not more credit to the space program than Armstrong) are mere footnotes in this story, just two people out of the 400,000 people who helped to bring them to that point.
In order to fully understand the first lunar landing, one must go back to the start. While there are other books out there that cover the space program in far more detail - University of Nebraska's Outward Odyssey series, for example - this book does the remarkable job of doing it in a single volume, getting all of the important details that went into NASA, but also pulling in the smaller peripheral details that gives the book a bit more interest. Nelson has done an incredible job of balancing the technical and human sides of the story, allowing neither to really overwhelm the reader, and is able to deliver a fantastic history. The story of Apollo is scattered throughout the book, at all levels of the production, design, training and preparations that went into the mission, starting all the way back to the Second World War, with the first military rockets developed by the Nazis and by Werner Von Braun, who would later turn himself over to the United States forces. From there, he leads a team that worked with the United States military until 1958, when NASA was commissioned by President Eisenhower. We meet the Mercury 7 astronauts, and look quickly to the missions that brought us into space, and the missions that would lead us to the moon, which were just as important as the actual landing itself.
This is where the book shows its true colors. Rather than being just examining the history of American space flight, there is a genuine look to how this all fits together in American history, as the Cold War raged onwards. The entire space race was a byproduct of the arms race that very nearly brought about our self-destruction at various points in the 1960s. Interwoven throughout this story is the delicate balance that the United States and Soviet Union rested upon, and it is quite clear that while the plaque that rests on the Tranquility Base landing strut proclaims that we came in peace for all of mankind, this is a particularly ironic statement, considering that much of the space program had roots in military technology.
For all of my bluster about this book being most than a reiteration of the Apollo mission reports, this book is quite possibly one of the most engaging and one of the better reads about the Apollo 11 mission. Details are numerous, and I get the impression that this was a rather hard task to accomplish, something that was largely glossed over in my own education. This was an enormously difficult and complicated program to pull off, and after this read, I am rather astonished that we were able to pull it off. This was a task that engaged hundreds of thousands of people, with enormous yields that go unappreciated by the general public, with amazing advances in communications, medical and engineering technologies that we use every day.
Recently, I've heard people say that all we got back from the moon was a sack of rocks (and offered up a free bag to taxpayers). While I'm astonished at the lack of vision that seems to be permeating the public when it comes to the space program - the book cites that 27% of people in my generation find it unlikely that we actually landed on the moon - I will remind you that the benefits are there, and tangible. Something that Nelson mentions early on in the book has stuck with me, where he notes that not a single dollar was spent on the moon - it was all spent on Earth. Hundreds of thousands of people were employed by NASA and the aerospace industries that helped to make it a reality. That number undoubtedly increases when all is said and done. The scientific findings alone are also astonishing, and have provided new insights to the birth of our planet and solar system. Even beyond that, there are numerous implications for utilizing the moon as a source of energy, from either the mining of Helium-3 from the surface or from Solar energy (where, as Mr. Nelson notes, a lack of cloud cover and a fairly constant view of the sun will come in handy), which could potentially help with the coming energy problems that we're going to face in the coming decades.
Apollo was more than just bringing back rocks. It pushed the boundaries of what was possible, helped to unite the world for one extraordinary, singular moment in our history when we most needed it, and showed us what was possible. This book does a fantastic job of explaining it all in an engaging manner, but like Apollo 11, it is all about the stepping stones and wonderful couple of hours that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spend on our nearest neighbor, and essentially ends with that mission. Sadly, after Apollo 17, the lunar missions ended, and NASA changed gears to the Shuttle program and low orbit missions to save costs. Nelson reserves the end of the book for a quick look at the past couple of years, and brings out his soap box to explain exactly why we need to return to space, for the fuel crisis, to beat the inevitable landings of China and India, but because it is in our nature to explore. We will return to the lunar surface someday. I can only hope that it is sooner, rather than later, because this is what the country and the world needs right now, something far more important than all of the technical and scientific accomplishments that came with Apollo: Hope.
Originally Posted to my Blog.
Riveting and compulsively readable August 4, 2009
Native New Yorker
3 out of 23 found this review helpful
I was ten when I watched that fuzzy image of Armstrong taking his moon walk. My whole family crowded around the TV, so thrilled and enthralled. This book just brought back all the amazement and excitement we felt about that time. This book is full of great details and big-picture analysis: all the background to the space race, all those personalities brought to life. It's also a fantastic book to share with my teens, so they can really understand the Cold War backdrop, the urgency of the mission, how it seized all our imaginations. An absolutely wonderful read!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 51
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