Customer Reviews

We Reach the Moon

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I first read this book right after it was published and even though I had followed the American space program through the Mercury, Gemini and early Apollo missions, I learned a great deal from it. Now, rereading it over thirty years later, it was a reminder of how great the space program was. Nearly all of the technology had to be invented in order to go to the moon and while there were some major setbacks, there was a can-do attitude that just does not exist in the space program now.

The space shuttle has been fraught with failures and the high morale and moral mission that existed in the space program of the sixties seems gone forever. Through my contacts in the avionics industry and what I read in the space press, a great deal of this is due to a stifling bureaucracy and a culture of assigning blame. People who had warned of the potential problems with ice on the O-rings before Challenger exploded were fired after the fact rather than asked to explain their reasoning and fix the problem. Reading this book takes you back to a time when the Moon was the goal, not the protection of funding and reputations.

This was one of the first books that I had aquired regarding the space program. I had it since I was in my late teens(now many years ago)but did not read it thoroughly until about 8 years ago.
One part that I kept coming back to many years ago was the fire of the Apollo 1. There are some pictures showing the aftermath of the fire. These were the first that I had seen of the inside of the spacefcraft. It was a real eye opener as to the dangers and gave me a better feeling of what the astronauts were prepared to do.
When I finally did read the book in it's entirty, I felt that it had been worth the wait.
Get one very inexpensively through the used book dealers listed on Amazon.