Apollo (Paperback)

by Charles Murray (Author), Catherine Bly Cox (Author) "On Thursday, May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy awoke to a glorious day, the kind that compensates Washingtonians for the oppressive summer to follow..." (more)
Key Phrases: other flight directors, umbilical tower, assistant flight director, North American, Space Task Group, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Heart-gripping.... So brilliantly told one can almost smell the perspiration in Houston Mission Control." -- Charles Petit, San Francisco Chronicle, July 9, 1989

"Marvelous.... Captures the mood and spirit of the people who found a way to the moon. -- Michael Collins, The New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1989

"Rich, densely packed and beautifully told.... Filled with cliffhangers, suspense and spine-tingling adventure." -- Charles Sheffield, Washington Post Book World, July 9 1989

Product Description
Out of print for fifteen years, this is the classic account of how the United States got to the moon. It is a book for those who were part of Apollo and want to recapture the experience and for those of a new generation who want to know how it was done. It is an opinon shared by many Apollo veterans. Republished in 2004 with a new Foreword by the authors.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: South Mountain Books (September 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976000806
• ISBN-13: 978-0976000808
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,413 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm So Glad this Book is Back in Print, January 3, 2005

By	Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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" 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. It had been an enormous undertaking, 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'm so glad this book is back in print. Buy it, read it, and encourage your friends to do so.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Apollo From the Ground Up, February 14, 2007

By	givbatam3 "givbatam3" (REHOVOT Israel) - See all my reviews

Anyone who has more than a passing interest in the space program, particularly manned spaceflight, will find this book invaluable. Here is the story of the people who made Apollo and the technological challenges they faced, both on the ground and in flight. Many books focus on the astronauts and their accomplishments, but this book focuses on those who designed the spacecraft, the rockets that propelled them into space, the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral and those who controlled the flight from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
For example, their are fascinating stories about the ultimate spacecraft
designer Max Faget, who designed every American spacecraft from Mercury to the Space Shuttle; the story of how an obscure engineer named John Houbolt managed to convince NASA to use the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mode for landing on the moon against formidable opposition from already legendary figures like Faget and Wernher Von Braun; the nightmarish combustion instability problem that plagued the immense F-1 rocket engine (five of which powered the Saturn V moon rocket's first stage); the development
of the huge transporter/crawler (and its "golden slippers") that transported the already assembled rocket out to Launch Complex 39 and the building of the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building where the assembly took place with the use of immense cranes that could set down a multi-ton
rocket state onto an egg without breaking it.
What is especially noteworthy in this book is the description of how
the legendary Christopher Kraft built the flight control system that ultimately became Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft Center. The authors explain what the job of each of the controllers was, how they communicated between themselves and the Flight Director and what personal characteristics were needed for the people who manned these jobs. The book also says how the different Flight Directors like Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney and Gerry Griffin, among others did their job and the crushing responsibility that was on their shoulders. Frankly, the autobiographies
of Kraft and Kranz do not describe these fascinating things like this book does. What is particularly engrossing are the descriptions of the crises that faced the controllers during the "1201 Alarm" episode Steve Bales confronted during the first lunar landing by Apollo 11's Eagle LM, the lightning strike that hit Apollo 12 during its ascent that John Aaron fixed, and, of course, the ultimate crisis of Apollo 13.
Reading this book left me in awe of the people that worked on Apollo facing the crushing pressure created by Kennedy's deadline of "by the end of the decade". It is truly an inspiring story, and unlike a similar
crash technological program called "The Manhattan Project", this one was made "in peace for all mankind".

I would also recommend for the reader who finds this book interesting, the book by Mike Gray called "Angle of Attack" which also deals with
North American Aviation's role in building Apollo, led by Harrison Storms.
There, other interesting examples of technological problem solving are illustrated regarding the building of the Command and Service Module in addition to the harrowing story of building the S-II Saturn V second state.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb view of a little covered aspect of the program, April 3, 2005

By	Thomas E. Brown (Easton, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I too and glad that this book is finally back in print. This is not an overview of Project Apollo with astronaut stories and illustrations, for that you should look for the beautiful 3 volume illlustrated edition of Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon. This book focuses almost exclusively on the vital contribution of the engineers and flight controllers and takes us into a world which usually is given short shrift. The missions are portrayed from within mission control itself and presents a superb sense of how the people involved thought and dealt with the problems. Top notch writing, that is accessible, but doesn't dumb things down.