Customer Reviews

Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I saw in one of the reviews that in 40 years this book will be the book everyone turns to. I hope not, because that means there will be a lot of misinformed people in 40 years.

There are some good things about this book. It is an entertaining read. It provides context to events that is helpful. It also includes stories I hadn't heard before, which is refreshing. The problem is the book is full of errors, some showing a basic lack of understanding of the subject matter. It gets so bad I'm left wondering what in the book I can actually trust.

If you are new to the subject and want a good book to read, I recommend either Chris Kraft's or Gene Cernan's books.

I'll give it two stars since it is an enjoyable read.


Here is some errors I can think of off the top of my head. (I didn't want to put them in my main review.) It's not a complete list:
* Stating Gene Cernan was commander of Apollo 15, instead of 17
* A completely wrong description of what Max-Q is
* Confusing escape velocity and orbital speed.
* Calling the landing radar PGNS (which makes sense, since it is pronounced PINGS, but wrong)
* Stating that Armstrong used the Abort Guidance System to land, since he had to maneuver around some boulders. It wasn't.

That's just a few, and you may ask what the big deal with them is. The problem is that they are so pervasive it destroys the credibility of the author.

This book is entertaining, imaginatively structured, and packed with information. Unfortunately, it's also riddled with errors. Some are just bizarre. On page 194, author Craig Nelson describes the first flight of the Saturn 5 in 1967, and he seems to have fallen into a parallel universe where the mission was a near disaster, instead of the "success on all accounts" described in Roger Bilstein's "Stages of Saturn" (accessible online). Here is what Nelson has to say: "On November 9 at 0700 EST, Apollo 4 launched. Two F-1 rockets abruptly quit during liftoff, at which the stack pulled a U-turn and headed screaming back at the ground. But the guidance system righted the vehicle, and the CM dummy capsule was successfully put into orbit." There are so many things wrong with that passage that it's hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say that everything about the performance of the rocket is incorrect and could not possibly have happened as described. It shows a basic misunderstanding of the fundamentals of the subject, which Nelson displays over and over. Take his "essential formula for rocketry" on page 96: "combine liquid fuel, oxygen (for added power and to operate in a vacuum), and a flame to trigger an explosion of gases...." There are four errors: the fuel can be, and often is, solid; the oxidizer is not for "added power," it's indispensible for a reaction to occur at all (leaving aside the special case of a monopropellant); some propellants ignite without a flame (for example, in the CM and LM); finally, it's not an explosion. This is not nitpicking; it's rocketry 101. Later in this passage, Nelson calls liquid hydrogen an oxidizer (it's a fuel). Such sloppy writing occurs throughout the book, which obviously was not checked by relevant experts. Still, I think it deserves more than one star. I give it three because Nelson has told a familiar story in a fresh way, and he's assembled a kind of "greatest hits" from Apollo memoirs and oral histories. It's a good read, but let the reader beware!

I received this book as a Christmas present, so at least it wasn't my money wasted on it.

I can only say that after reading the other Amazon reviews here and doing a little thumbing through this book, my preliminary assessment is this author doesn't really know a damned thing about his subject.

One only has to read his account on page 194 of the first Saturn V launch (Apollo 4)to understand the absolute cluelessness that this author has for his subject.

And I quote: "Two F-1 rockets abruptly quit during liftoff, at which the stack pulled a U-turn and headed screaming back at the ground. But the guidance system righted the vehicle..."

The next sentence goes on to describe the equally "trouble-filled" Apollo 5 launch in which two engines on the three stage vehicle died.

There is so much wrong concentrated into these two sentences it's hard to know where to start to untangle the mess and inaccuracy the author packs in here:

1) The first Saturn V launch was virtually flawless. Two of its F-1 engines did NOT quit (no F-1 engine ever failed in any Saturn V launch--65 engines launched, 65 flawless performances over thirteen Saturn V launches).

2) No Saturn V could have made a "U-turn" in flight and come screaming back at the ground. If it had, the vehicle would have broken up under the aerodynamic stresses of doing a loop-de-loop.

3) Apollo 5 was also a perfect launch--it was a two stage Saturn 1B launch that placed an unmanned LEM into low earth orbit for testing. It was not, as the author states, a three stage vehcle, on which "two of its engines died...which would have carried the craft to the moon."

Apollo 5 was intended to test he LEM in low earth orbit, not the moon, and it did so as planned.

What the author is tangling up here is the story of Apollo 6--the second test of the Saturn V in April, 1968. On that troubled flight, the Saturn V did indeed loose two engines. But they were two J-2 engines on the second stage, not first stage F-1 engines. Even then the guidance system worked--the vehicle did not make a "U-turn" but headed successfully into orbit. The third stage J-2 engine failed to re-ignite but even so the CM payload was not intended to go to the moon.

If this tangled, warped, totally inaccurate account can pack so much wrong into two consecutive sentances, I can only wonder what else wrong is out there in nearly 350 pages of narrative. It'll be fun to see and I can report back. But I suspect this book will overtake, as some other reviewers have already noted, the record for errors per page density of the pathetically fact-challenged For All Mankind by Harry Hurt.

Tom Frieling
University of Georgia Libraries
tfrielin@uga.edu


ADDENDUM--I posted this yesterday(1/16/2010--below) to the Author's Discussion page of Amazon's 'about the author page' yesterday. But today, I see the link has been taken down. Don't know why, but given the apparent plans for a paperback edition of this book, I hope the publishers will run the book by some knowledgable fact-checkers to expunge the errors and to correct errors of interpretaion, both of which would vastly improve this book. TJF

Thomas J. Frieling says:
It's really a sorry sight to read this author's posts defending his indefensible errors and just general mis-understandings of his subject.

Sadly, this book joins a long line of error-riddled space books like Hurt's For All Mankind, the notorious Cambridge Encyclopedia of Space, and Reynolds Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon to name just a few. Does the author's publisher employ no copy editors? Do they not fact-check manuscripts? Evidently not.

I reviewed space books for seventeen years for Library Journal and in that time saw far too many sloppily produced books that a copy editor and a knowledgeable fact-checker could have saved, just as this book could have been saved.

The irritating thing is how easy it is to fact-check space-related books. Just to give one example:

In the author's account of the launch of Apollo 11 he quotes from the mission transcript that Armstrong says "Skirts up" at the 3:13 mark and the Capcom dutifully replies, "Roger, skirts up'".

This cryptic exchange leaves the reader to ponder "Skirt? What skirt? And why is the skirt up? Aren't they wearing space suits, not skirts? WTF is this skirt thing supposed to mean?"

The author offers no explanation.

But all a puzzled and curious reader would have to do is Google "Apollo 11 Mission Transcript" and scroll down to the three minute, thirteen second part to learn that Armstrong really said "Skirt sep"; i.e., he was reporting the separation of the S-II stage interstage, also referred to as the aft skirt. That's that big ring that separates from the S-II stage about thirty seconds after S-II ignition and is what you see in that oft-shown footage from the on-board cameras (go to You Tube and type in "Saturn V S-II stage separation" to watch it yourself).

It's that easy to get the facts straight.

I was sorry to see that a paperback edition is planned, but if that's the case I beg the publisher to run the book by a couple of fact-checkers--maybe the posters to this discussion--so the errors can be expunged from this book.

Thomas J. Frieling
University of Georgia
tfrielin@uga.edu

Addendum #2 (May 7, 2010) I just posted this to the Author's Discussion page. For any serious space history buffs out there who hoped the author would follow through on his promise to correct the many factual errors when the paperback edition came out will be sorely disappointed. I just bought he paperback and practically nothing of any consequence was fixed. The paperback is as thouroughly error-riddled as the hardback, plus all the mis-interpretations, non sequiters, and general mis-understandings of the subject are in there too. Sad, really.


On Nov 12, 2009, Craig Nelson posted on this discussion page:

"For all of you who've made efforts to point out specific errors in Rocket Men, thank you so much. I've spent almost a month tracking down and making corrections, and unfortunately they could not be included in the most recent hardcover printing, but they will appear in the paperback in June 2010. - Craig Nelson"

Well, I just bought the paperback edition and thumbed through it, comparing it to the error-riddled hardback edition and I have to say that very, very little effort evidentally was made to fix the many errors in this paperback edition as Nelson promised above.

I found a total of two fixes--both minor compared to the howlers that are still in this train wreck of a book: On page page 148 of the paperback, "miles per second" is changed to "meters per second" in the account of MR-2. I'll have to do the math to see if this change makes the account accurate. The one other change on page 199 fixes the typo about Apollo 8 being launched in 1948. The copy editor or the crack fact checker did some heavy lifting changing 1948 to the correct 1968. Big whoop.

But all the other howlers in the book? ALL still in there in the supposedly "fixed" paperback edition.

That the X-15 was aerotowed like a sailplane? Still in there.

That Armstrong logged over four thousand hours in the X-15? Still in there.

The totally bollixed up account of the first Saturn V launch losing two F-1 engines and pulling a u-turn followed in the very next sentance with an equally mixed up account of Apollo 5? Still in there.

The confused acccount of the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn? Still in there.

Armstrong quoted as saying "Skirts up" instead of "Skirt sep"? Still in there.

The mis-representation of exactly when Aldrin used the felt tip pen to arm the broken circuit breaker (Nelson's account leads the reader to believe this was done the moment before lunar liftoff is wrong. No less an expert than Eric Jones of ALSJ fame confirmed to me that Aldrin used the pen on the breaker at least two hours before liftoff). Still in there.

In short, nothing of substance was fixed in this paperback edition--it is just as bad a history of Apollo 11 as the hardback edition was.

The real scandal here is the fact that Rocket Men got glowing reviews in the mainstream press (irritating excerpts of the reviews, of course, included in the front of this edition).

Something is terribly wrong with the publishing vetting process, and especially, the book reviewing process whereby people who are not subject experts are asked to write reviews that result in badly written books like this one garnering rave reviews. So far, I have come across only one review (in the Journal of American History) that recognized that this book was full of errors and mis-interpretations of the history of Apollo.

All I can say is thank God for the Internet and Amazon.com reviewers who have made an effort to set the record straight about this pathetic faux history.

Thomas J. Frieling
University of Georgia Libraries
tfrielin@uga.edu

P.S. I just double-checked and that crowd pleasing howler about the astronauts' visors being gold plated so in case they encountered aliens on the moon, the aliens would't be able to peer in at the astronauts' faces? Yeah, that's still in there too!

I have to say, the author CHOSE to write about an event which is intensely tied to technology. It is also a real event in history. If accuracy in the essential technological aspects is not important to Mr. Nelson, as a person writing history, he has made a poor choice of subject matter. If you purport to write history, there exists an obligation to do your research! Betraying the fact that he didn't, apparently, bother to research or have the technical aspects proofread, tells me that Nelson isn't committed to accuracy, and that is a cardinal sin for a historian!

That begs the question: What basis does this sloppy approach give me for believing that anything else, including the non-technical, presented in this work as fact is accurately portrayed?

I agree that there are engaging passages, and sometimes an interesting and unusual slant on events, but if you want an engaging, ACCURATE account of Apollo 11, read Mike Collin's "Carrying the Fire" (he really is the most literate of the moon voyagers, and the most dryly humorous) , or for the project as a whole through the eyes of the astronauts, Andrew Chaikin's superb "A Man on the Moon". "Rocket Men" is for me an interesting approach that needs a major overhaul to become a decent book.

Let me begin this review by first mentioning a different book on the same subject--Harry Hurt's 1988 "For All Mankind." In the 20-plus years since its publication (timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing), "For All Mankind" has reigned supreme as the most technically inept attempt at a spaceflight book ever. Filled with gross misconceptions, major factual errors and incorrect "explanations" of spaceflight technology, "For All Mankind" is so bad that it is hard to imagine that a book about the Apollo program could be any worse. Well, Craig Nelson's "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon," is worse. Far worse. Mind-numbingly worse. "Rocket Men" forges such a huge lead in the race for the worst spaceflight book ever written that even "For All Mankind" is left behind in the dust, a distant also-ran. "Rocket Men" is so bad, and so filled with breathtaking, jaw-dropping, forehead-striking technical errors, that you may momentarily find yourself wondering if it is really intended to be a satire on space "geekdom." But, sadly, it isn't, And if you have the misfortune to buy this book without realizing what you're getting, you will be very, very disappointed.

Don't take my word for it. Consider the following examples, as well as those provided by many other science-trained people who have posted reviews here. Then imagine a book filled to the brim with similar errors, inconsistencies, misstatements and graphic examples of Mr. Nelson's utter lack of knowledge of science, history, technology, aviation and spaceflight:

-- The X-15 had "...only 600,000 horsepower--one-fourth the velocity needed for orbit..." (Page 52)

-- The Apollo Command Module was "...a copper, silver and white cone made from iron reinforced with porcelain..." (79)

-- The Saturn V's F-1 engines produced "...a thrust that was four times the speed of sound..." (83)

-- Max Q, the period of maximum dynamic pressure on a rocket during ascent, is "...the outermost combination of gravity fighting speed..." (133)

-- On chimpanzee Ham's Mercury-Redstone flight: "...An abort call was made, which yanked the retro rockets, but Mission Control could not slow the capsule for reentry..." (149)

-- On Apollo 4: "...Two F-1 rockets abruptly quit during liftoff, at which point the stack pulled a U-turn and headed screaming back at the ground..." (194)

-- Fixing a J-2 engine involved "...repairing a flexible bellows-joint in the liquid hydrogen plumbing that kept cracking when it hit the ceiling of Earth's atmosphere..." (198)

-- During ascent, "...the astronauts were gradually and insistently pressed down further by the weight of their rocket's velocity..." (207)

-- What the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn did was "...slow the craft to 2,917 feet per second, allowing it to fall into the pull of the Moon's gravity. The gravitational warp in space-time then threw it like a slingshot to the dark side..." (225)

-- At Johnson Space Center, "...the Trench got its name from the fact that the floors of Mission Control were linked by pneumatic tubes of compressed air through which memoranda-stuffed aluminum cylinders shot back and forth--a technology from the Space Age of 1806..." (240)

And finally, in perhaps the most bizarre statement ever made in a purportedly non-fiction book:

-- The reason the astronauts' space suits had gold-plated visors was so that "...in the unlikely event of a hostile encounter, its reflection would keep aliens from being able to peer into a human face..." (268)

Some reviewers call technical errors such as these "nits," and say that the rest of "Rocket Men" is so well-written that they can be ignored. I don't see it that way. To anyone with the slightest knowledge of science and technology, these errors simply prove that Mr. Nelson is totally ignorant of these subjects and has no qualifications whatsoever to write a book about spaceflight. These "nits" show that Mr. Nelson lacks an understanding of the Apollo program on its most fundamental level--how it worked. Science and technology were the heart and soul of Apollo, and by getting those parts of the story wrong, "Rocket Men" loses all credibility and value. Other than to capitalize financially on the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I have to wonder why any author would try to write a book about a subject he knows so little about. I could do as well writing a book about, for example, contract bridge, about which I know absolutely nothing, and I would expect it to be equally disastrous and equally useless. There's a reason why so many knowledgeable reviewers recommend Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts." It is the best Apollo program history so far written. "Rocket Men" is the worst.

Bottom line: give "Rocket Men" a wide berth. Don't buy it. Don't even check it out of a library. Any time you spend between the covers of "Rocket Men" is time you'd be much better off spending doing something else.

While the book is absolutely terrible, I did learn a lot by reading the corrections of fact listed in the other reviews!

Mr. Nelson apparently has no technical background. If his editors at Viking had considered that circumstance they might have arranged for a technical review that could have corrected multiple errors. I could cite several, but one will be sufficient to make my point--on page 229 Mr. Nelson writes that the surface temperature of the Moon in darkness is "minus one hundred kelvins." Minus kelvins? I rest my case.

I was an engineer at Kennedy on Gemini and Apollo and have more than a passing interest in (and knowledge of) the subject.

After reading the first few chapters of this book, I could not decide if it was a very good humor book or a very poor history book. After finishing it and noting well over 150 obvious errors, I think the latter.


Some of the gems:

Apollo 4 did NOT do a U-turn after launch and head for the ground (pg. 194)
MR-2 and Ham did NOT hit 2,298 miles per SECOND (pg. 149)
Saturn V did NOT use frozen O2 & H2 (pg. 6)
LM ladder temp at touchdown was NOT 2,000 deg (pg. 280)
Apollo 8 did NOT launch in 1948 (it was 1968) (pg. 199)
LH2 is NOT an oxidizer (pg. 97)
Armstrong did NOT log 4,000 hrs in the X-15 (on just 7 flights!) (pg. 53)
escape velocity from Earth is NOT 18,000 mph (pg. 125)
CSM and LM did NOT cost $100K each (pg. 7)
LM descent stage had only had 1 engine, NOT "engines" (pg. 247)
Thor is an ICBM on pg. 113, but downgrades to an IRBM by pg. 117
LM did NOT use hydrogen peroxide for the attitude thrusters (pg. 60, 234)
GET is Ground Elapsed Time, NOT "General" (pg. 84)
NASA's Wallops Island facility is in Virginia, NOT Maryland (pg. 129)

The list goes on. And on and on.

On pg. 210 he writes "an LM". Anybody who doesn't know "LM" is pronounced "lem" and not "ell em" should not be writing about it. (Same comment for "an LOX plant" on pg. 106.)

And where did he come up with the idea that the gold-plated visors would be helpful in keeping aliens from seeing human faces (pg. 268)?

This might be the worst space history book I have ever read. Do yourself a favor and instead read "In the Shadow of the Moon" and "Into That Silent Sea" by French and Burgess and "The First Men on the Moon" by Harland; this one is pretty poor.

Mister Nelson: I understand, through your other written works, that you are a scholar of Thomas Paine.

I would suggest that pondering a quotation attributed to Paine may give you some assistance when considering re-editing your book "Rocket Men":

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."

Your book is so full of errors of fact and interpretation (not just in engineering terms but also in the characters, their motives, and the basic story of what happened) that I suspect the book might be unrecoverable. However, for you to at least attempt to correct it so as not to leave only a personal legacy of deeply flawed history, you need to personally understand the depth of the problems with this seriously underresearched book.

I hope you do so. It's the only honest and reasonable thing to do. And after all, as Paine is also supposed to have said, "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason."

I really wanted to like this book. It was, after all, released very near the anniversary of the first moon landing, and the pre-release information promised that is would be the most detailed and authoritative account of the Space Race and the Apollo program that culminated in an American victory. Unfortunately, the reality of the book just doesn't live up to the promise, in several ways.

First, the good news: The book actually does offer a good account of the complex politics, economic factors, and social issues that both enveloped and produced the manned space program. It also narrates the personal stories of the main figures quite well.

The problem for me is that the book is riddled with factual errors, some of them minor but others so jarring that I began to doubt everything the author wrote. This seems so strange to me; after all, the author is an award-winning writer and a former publishing house executive, and the book's publisher is a mainstream company. However, it seems that no one did even the most basic fact checking.

For example, the author repeatedly confuses orbital velocity and escape velocity, and he seemingly randomly switches between miles per hour, feet per second, and so on. Picky? Not really; this is supposed to be a book about one of the greatest scientific and technical achievements in human history. Readers should be able to assume that the author has a basic grasp of the science and technology involved.

There were glaring non-technical errors as well. For example, in his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the author explains the Russians were in part responding to the US deployment of Atlas ICBMs to Turkey. No, they weren't. The delicate and lengthy fueling operation the Atlas required made them completely unsuitable for remote deployment. The US missiles in Turkey were Jupiters. Picky? Again, no. The author claims that deployment was a key to the crisis, which, in turn, had much to do with JFK's need to do something to demonstrate leadership and American prowess.

This could have been a absolutely great book. It's stylishly written, the astronauts are portrayed as the humans they were, and the topic is important. But I found the factual errors to be completely unacceptable. I really wanted to like this book, but I don't like it very much at all...