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Apollo: Race to the Moon

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Perhaps the best general account of the lunar program, this history uses interviews and documents to reconstruct the stories of the people who participated in Apollo. Although published in 1989 and long out of print, "Apollo: The Race to the Moon" still stands out as the best popular book on the subject ever to appear.

Neither a warmed over account of the astronauts and their adventures on the Moon nor a large-format illustrated history--both of which are in abundance--this book seeks to understand the larger contact of Apollo by focusing on the massive technical and scientific infrastructure that made the trips to the Moon possible. Taking as its central characters not the astronauts but the managers and engineers who ran the program, this book by famed author and political lightning rod Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox is based extensively on interviews with the remaining actors of the endeavor. The authors spent considerable time talking to NASA officials, both active and retired, at the Johnson Space Center, the Marshall Space Flight Center, and the Kennedy Space Centers, as well as high level officials in Washington. In this book Murray and Cox reconstruct a non-scholarly account of Apollo that examines operational details of the program that have gone undiscussed in astronaut-centric works.

By taking this approach Murray and Cox shift the history of Apollo to its most appropriate place. They recognize that the feat, as impressive as it was and as heroic as the astronauts truly were, was essentially an accomplishment of systems management. It was an endeavor that demonstrated both the technological and economic virtuosity of the United States and established national preeminence over rival nations--the primary goal of the program when first envisioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961.

Apollo was an enormous and complex undertaking, as Murray and Cox document with great skill, costing $25.4 billion with only the building of the Panama Canal rivaling the Apollo program's size as the largest non-military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States and only the Manhattan Project being comparable in a wartime setting.

Murray and Cox emphasize that Project Apollo was a triumph of management in meeting the enormously difficult systems engineering and technological integration requirements. James E. Webb, the NASA Administrator at the height of the program between 1961 and 1968, always contended that Apollo was much more a management exercise than anything else, and that the technological challenge, while sophisticated and impressive, was also within grasp. More difficult was ensuring that those technological skills were properly managed and used. Webb's contention was confirmed in spades by the success of Apollo. NASA leaders had to acquire and organize unprecedented resources to accomplish the task at hand.

There is a wonderful editorial in the November 1968 issue of "Science" magazine, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which speaks to the management system that Murray and Cox bring to life in this book: "In terms of numbers of dollars or of men, NASA has not been our largest national undertaking, but in terms of complexity, rate of growth, and technological sophistication it has been unique....It may turn out that [the space program's] most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings."

If you want to understand the Apollo program, you must read and ponder this important book by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. I only wish it were still in print.

Amazon is now selling the 2004 edition (which no longer has the subtitle "The Race to the Moon"). Search on "Apollo" for title and "Murray" or "Cox" for author.

There are also audio files, and lots of extra pictures not included in the book at their website, where you can also buy the book.

You can get more information at http://www.apollostory.com/

This book is built around the very human stories of the engineers (not the astronauts; who cares about those damn astronauts?) who built a machine that took men to the moon and back. It's truly amazing, when you think about it. In less than eight years, they built a great big machine that took people to the surface of the moon and back. It's not often you get to see engineers portrayed as heros, but that's exactly what this book is all about. The authors, Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, have a real flair for digging into the details that make the stories and the people come to life, underscoring this is how it really happened. All engineers should read this book; it's immensely entertaining, but it's also a real sourcebook of stories about how to get extraordinarily complex engineering projects done on time and on budget. Caldwell Johnson, one of the lead designers of the Apollo vehicle, sums it up well with a terrific engineering viewpoint: "After a while, you really become appalled that you've gotten yourself involved in the thing. At first, it's an academic exercise. And then the first thing you know, there's people building these things, and they are really getting ready to do it, and you start thinking: Have I made a real bad judgment somewhere, and the damn thing is just not going to work at all?" Highly recommended.

On May 25 1961 President John Kennedy addressed Congress on his plan to put a man on the Moon within nine years. This date is usually considered the inception of the Apollo program, one of the most ambitious and advanced engineering projects in history. The idea for Apollo had already been conceived in the last year of the Eisenhower administration, but the main credit for pushing it into the shape that has become familiar to the World.

This book aims to describe the achievements of the Apollo program from the point of view of the engineers and other technological staff. Apollo is arguably the most ambitious engineering program in history, and the fact that it was so successfully carried out was tremendously inspirational for all of humanity. Achieving what was considered almost an unattainable goal just a few years earlier at such a rapid pace left everyone imagining that the decades ahead will usher an unprecedented human colonization of space. As we well know now, these were grossly unrealistic expectations, and have led many to be disillusioned with the human exploration of space. Others, on the other hand, have grown up taking lunar landing for granted in the light of subsequent shuttle missions, and don't appreciate the tremendous effort that went into the Apollo program. In the light of all of that, this book serves as a wonderful reminder of how difficult this whole endeavor was and how many tremendous feats of engineering had been accomplished along the way.

This book is not written with some overarching deep message in mind. The authors primarily concentrate on many invaluable individuals behind the Apollo program and try to explain in the most general terms the contributions that these remarkable men (and a very few women as it turns out) had made. For the most part they let the stories speak for themselves, although due to the enormity of this project and the high number of individuals working on it a lot of editorializing had to be done. Nonetheless, one message that one can glean from this book is that even though Apollo was a grand team effort, there are many outstanding individuals who have left an indelible mark on the whole undertaking.

Because of its great deal of technical detail this book is not for everyone. However, if you have an appreciation for grand scientific and engineering endeavors this book is an excellent source of information about one of the greatest such endeavors. It is detailed, thorough, and clearly written. It ought to be an indispensable part of any library of works on history of science and technology.

It is a crying shame that this wonderful book appears to be VERY out of print. It answers all the questions any technologically curious person would have about the design of the systems, the testing, how mission control worked, what all those acronyms really mean, the geeky geniuses and tough managers that made the program succeed. it covers the surprising numbers of "glitches" that made every mission more dramatic than news reports led viewers to believe.

Could it be that author Murray followed up this gem with the controversial The Bell Curve, and the publishing establishment is reluctant to see him prosper? Or is there a less nefarious explanation?

A comprehensive look at the whole of the Apollo program is given in "Apollo: the Race to the Moon". As well as the flights and the astronauts, this book also looks at the technology involved - the crawler and its special roadway, the exacting requirements for the lauchpad ("Stage Zero") to stand a Saturn launch, the problems in developing the F1 engines that powered the Saturn first stage, the power and magnificence or a Saturn launch.

This is the best book I have ever read on the Apollo program. Written from the unique perspective of the engineering effort of Apollo, it offers a wonderful view into what it's like to have such a lofty, seemingly unattainable challenge laid before you and then accomplish it. As another reviewer mentions, this is a great book for ideas about how to manage large engineering projects. I ocassionally reread the book when I want to revive and reinvigorate my thinking on these types of issues.

I just met one of the principle people interviewd for this book, and he called it the best book on Apollo for "outsiders." This book lays out the challenges (man, moon, decade), problems ("combustion instability"), and solutions (duct tape!) all in an incredibly readable format.

No cute astronaut stories. This is about the engineering that made Apollo work!

The stories of a very dedicated group of people who had a goal (pushed by president Kenedy)of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safetly to earth. You can feel the tension of the men after the apollo 1 fire. You can experience the triumph of apollo 4. Feel the near paralysis of Sy Liebergot as he tries to wrestle with apollo 13. This story also has some very funny moments, like Chris Kraft thinking (due to a prank) that he actually launched a rocket during a simulation. Very much worth reading!!!!!