Books in Brief: Apollo: The Race to the Moon

Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox (Simon & Schuster, 506 pp., $24.95)

Apollo is the story of the engineers and managers who got us to the Moon—the people who were neither glorified nor powerful. It’s also the story of a government program that worked. The two factors are not unrelated. The authors bring us from the Eisenhower days, when NASA was a quiet backwater where a few dreamers talked of space travel, through the enormous increase in size and complexity brought on by JFK’s macho commitment to a safe Moon landing and return (made only after all his other macho commitments had blown up in his face), and the concomitant bureaucratization of a previously free-wheeling enterprise, to, briefly, the breakup of the “team” in the Seventies. They introduce a cast of characters markedly more creative, colorful, and fun than most of us imagine engineers to be, among them Maxime Faget and Caldwell Johnson, the ultimate design team, and quite aware of it; Chris Kraft, Glynn Lunney, Gene Krantz, and other “super-cool” flight controllers, men who made twenty-plus decisions a minute and established a variety of eccentricities to blow off steam; Bill Tindall, the trouble-shooter who actually figured out how to get to the moon. For in Apollo we follow the creative process on the individual and team level: once given Kennedy’s directive, these men were forced to invent, not just the machines and the ways of using them, but an entire sub-culture moved by a collective ideal rarely present on the government payroll. Which is why this Kennedy initiative worked when most others failed: more than technology, the early NASA shaped men—men in a brotherhood challenging themselves and the envelope of human achievement. —MARK CUNNINGHAM

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Mark Cunningham

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Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox (Simon & Schuster, 506 pp., $24.95)

Apollo is the story of the engineers and managers who got us to the Moon—the people who were neither glorified nor powerful. It’s also the story of a government program that worked. The two factors are not unrelated. The authors bring us from the Eisenhower days, when NASA was a quiet backwater where a few dreamers talked of space travel, through the enormous increase in size and complexity brought on by JFK’s macho commitment to a safe Moon landing and return (made only after all his other macho commitments had blown up in his face), and the concomitant bureaucratization of a previously free-wheeling enterprise, to, briefly, the breakup of the “team” in the Seventies. They introduce a cast of characters markedly more creative, colorful, and fun than most of us imagine engineers to be, among them Maxime Faget and Caldwell Johnson, the ultimate design team, and quite aware of it; Chris Kraft, Glynn Lunney, Gene Krantz, and other “super-cool” flight controllers, men who made twenty-plus decisions a minute and established a variety of eccentricities to blow off steam; Bill Tindall, the trouble-shooter who actually figured out how to get to the moon. For in Apollo we follow the creative process on the individual and team level: once given Kennedy’s directive, these men were forced to invent, not just the machines and the ways of using them, but an entire sub-culture moved by a collective ideal rarely present on the government payroll. Which is why this Kennedy initiative worked when most others failed: more than technology, the early NASA shaped men—men in a brotherhood challenging themselves and the envelope of human achievement. —MARK CUNNINGHAM