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

By Craig Nelson and Craig Nelson

Book Overview

A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of the greatest achievements of humankind At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men is the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vivid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quotidian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right into the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670021032
• ISBN13: 9780670021031
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.6" x 1.4" x 6.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Great Review of History

Written 40 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, it captures how great a leap was made in the formative space age years 1959-1969. Now that we are winding down our prescence in manned space, it help us define what goals meant in our history and how the administration has dropped the ball , leaving the U.S. a second rate space power after so much work.

Lighten Up!!

First off, I thought this was a great read in spite of the few technical and grammatical errors I did come across. If you're planning on launching a rocket to the moon from your backyard anytime soon, you probably ought not rely on this book as a how-to technical manual. If you're interested in the moon race and the personalities behind the project, this is a must read. I thought it was a great story. To all the negative reviewers (rocket scientists and engineers), get off Nelson's back and go back to your slide rule. It does not matter to me if Nelson incorrectly stated the required escape velocity from Earth. All I really need to know is that I must peddle my bicycle really, really hard to escape the earth's gravitation pull to make it to the moon. What? You're now going to argue with me that I can't ride my bicycle to the moon?

Riveting and compulsively readable

I was ten when I watched that fuzzy image of Armstrong taking his moon walk. My whole family crowded around the TV, so thrilled and enthralled. This book just brought back all the amazement and excitement we felt about that time. This book is full of great details and big-picture analysis: all the background to the space race, all those personalities brought to life. It's also a fantastic book to share with my teens, so they can really understand the Cold War backdrop, the urgency of the mission, how it seized all our imaginations. An absolutely wonderful read!

An Essential Book for the Apollo Program

2009 is a lunar year. The film Moon was released earlier this month, to much critical success, the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing approaches in July, and fittingly, there is a new book that examines the history of Apollo 11, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson. In a wonderful PR move, the publisher, Viking, will release the book on July 13th, just days before the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11- Just enough time to read it and know exactly what's going on for that party that you'll be out, when someone will mention Apollo 11. The thing is- this book really isn't about Apollo 11. The front of the book states this, it's a fairly comprehensive look at the mission, but this book accomplishes much more than simply looking at this extraordinary story in vivid detail: it looks at the entire sequence of events that lead up to that moment when Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. This is an incredibly important thing, I believe, because not a whole lot of people know about anything beyond those words, and that some old guy walked around on our nearest satellite. Armstrong and that other guy (Buzz Aldrin, who deserves just as much, if not more credit to the space program than Armstrong) are mere footnotes in this story, just two people out of the 400,000 people who helped to bring them to that point. In order to fully understand the first lunar landing, one must go back to the start. While there are other books out there that cover the space program in far more detail - University of Nebraska's Outward Odyssey series, for example - this book does the remarkable job of doing it in a single volume, getting all of the important details that went into NASA, but also pulling in the smaller peripheral details that gives the book a bit more interest. Nelson has done an incredible job of balancing the technical and human sides of the story, allowing neither to really overwhelm the reader, and is able to deliver a fantastic history. The story of Apollo is scattered throughout the book, at all levels of the production, design, training and preparations that went into the mission, starting all the way back to the Second World War, with the first military rockets developed by the Nazis and by Werner Von Braun, who would later turn himself over to the United States forces. From there, he leads a team that worked with the United States military until 1958, when NASA was commissioned by President Eisenhower. We meet the Mercury 7 astronauts, and look quickly to the missions that brought us into space, and the missions that would lead us to the moon, which were just as important as the actual landing itself. This is where the book shows its true colors. Rather than being just examining the history of American space flight, there is a genuine look to how this all fits together in American history, as the Cold War raged onwards. The entire spac

A must-read classic history

This is a shortened version of a detailed review posted at my Science Shelf book review archive. (Guess the URL--all lower-case--and you'll be right.) It was a time not unlike our own. A newly elected young president with a flair for inspirational rhetoric and ambitious goals challenged the United States to re-establish its world leadership. Addressing Congress on May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy declared, "I believe that this nation, should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth." Eight years later, on July 20, 1969, a rapt world watched grainy black-and-white analog broadcast television images as Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. Today we watch elaborately produced retrospectives of the Apollo 11 moon landing in crisp, full-color, high-definition, digital format. But as Craig Nelson notes in his new book Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, the mythology surrounding the accomplishment is the same as it was when Armstrong took that "one small step" four decades ago. The feat was technological, but its goal was clearly political and rooted in the Cold War.... The book is filled with in-their-own-words descriptions drawn from NASA's transcripts and oral history archive. These place readers on the scene with the astronauts, their families, and the launch and mission control teams. Its centerpiece, of course, is the Apollo 11 mission, [but its historical insights go far beyond that one flight].... "The standard version of the history of NASA has always been that, alarmed and deflated by Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the United States created a wholly civilian agency that, through the vital legacy of its youngest president, won the Space Race 'in peace for all mankind.' Besides the fact that almost all these assertions are either misleading or expressly false,... [t]he actual story is much richer and the achievements more profound." [For example:] in the final days of World War II ... Operation Paper Clip ... brought Wernher von Braun and his brilliant team of ex-Nazi rocket scientists to the United States rather than Russia. Their moral ambiguity and engineering excellence are on display side-by-side. Nelson never falls into the trap of either lionizing or demonizing these problematic but important figures--including one who was eventually revealed to be a war criminal, stripped of U.S. citizenship, and deported, but not before he made important contributions to NASA rocketry.... In many ways, Nelson's task in presenting this history is as daunting as NASA's original challenge. But he rises to the occasion with meticulous research, skillful storytelling rich in detail, and a narrative arc as stimulating and disciplined as Apollo 11's own trajectory through space and history.... The book closes with a poignant and thought-provoking discussion of the biggest question faced by the astronauts and agency alike: Wh