Customer Reviews

Gateway to the Moon

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It seems that today, when a space shuttle is launched, or a rerun of an Apollo Saturn V is launched, the Kennedy Space Center launch complex construction achievement is taken for granted. The media today skips the history of developing the launch complex.

This book chronicles the history of KSC, and includes histories of cost overruns, labor problems, design problems, and even political battles.

Many people who grew up during the Apollo era can recall the newspaper stories, however, if you were too young to have read these stories in the 1960's, this book is a great summary.

In 1978 Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty published "Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations" as NASA Special Publication-4204. It was an outstanding history of the design and construction of the lunar launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center. Of "Moonport," a reviewer in the "Journal of American History" said in 1979, "The authors had access to official documents, letters, and memoranda, and they have apparently consulted all the relevant historical, technological, and scientific secondary materials...all the involved historians obviously spent con-siderable time studying and intellectually digesting technical reports and manuals in order to give their lay readers such lucid accounts of highly complex procedures and operations...it is important to public knowledge to have professionally trained his-torians employ historical methods to ex-plain significant events and place them in a meaningful historical context. Here is a broad lesson...that contemporary society can ill afford to ignore."

"Moonport" has been out of print for many years, and comanding a high price on the second-hand book market, but now it has been reprinted in a convenient paperback version. "Gateway to the Moon" contains the first half of the text of "Moonport," chapters 1-14 of the earlier work. For anyone interested in the race to the Moon, this book is a must read!

This book - along with it's companion Moon Launch! are the definite account of the mammoth undertaking that was the establishment of Kennedy Space Centre in the 1960's. Everything about KSC and it's environs is on an epic scale, and these scholarly but very readable works bring to life the day to day management decisions, tensions, inter-center conflicts and eventual unanimity that was a hallmark of NASA in it's greatest era of expansion.

Highly recommended.

This book, along with it's "other half", "Moon Launch" (the two books are a set, one being the coninuation of the other, although this fact is not obvious when reading the books' descriptions) tell the story of the Apollo moon program (of which I was a part) in a very unique way -- from it's beginnings, through the tough design and decision-making stages, to it's failures and sucesses.

If you lived in the Cape Canaveral area during the late 60's and early 70's, or if you worked for NASA or one of it's contractors during that time, you will find plenty of details in these books to bring back memories that you might have lost forever. The emphasis on contractor roles, technical details, and historical details make these books different from any others I've ever seen about the Apollo program. You'll learn, for example, how and why the VAB was built the way it was built, how the decision to use a mobile launcher and crawler was based on a similar machine used in Kentucky to mine coal, and how much of the technology required for the program had to be invented, developed, and tested "on the fly.". After reading the book, you'll be amazed that we put a man (actually several men on several missions) on the moon in such a short time.

I have been interested in NASA and the Moon Program in particular and have built a small library of astronaut biographies, mission control biographies and a few chronicles of engineering of the vehicles. This book is interesting that it covers a different topic - the Kennedy Space Center. It is written as a history and does feel a little bit "official" in parts with details of contracts that probably most don't care too much about. I think it would have been great if the book had been edited down to about half of its 320 page size.