Reflecting on man’s giant leap 50 years later

One day, about 60 years ago, a scientist made his way to the library at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. The Cold War was on; the Soviets had just deployed their Sputnik satellite. The American scientist was “looking for books on orbital mechanics — on how to fly in space,” Charles Fishman writes. How many did he find? “Exactly one: Forest R. Moulton’s classic, ‘An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics.’ In 1958, Langley was in possession of the most recent version of Moulton: the 1914 update of the 1902 edition.”

The space race had begun, and the U.S. had a lot to learn. Though we know how this contest turned out — a halfcentury ago this month, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin stepped out of the Apollo 11 landing craft and became the first people on the moon — those early days of space exploration continue to offer fresh subplots. Three new books, distinct yet complementary, mark the 50th anniversary of the epochal event, revealing the Apollo program’s underappreciated wonders, assessing its legacy and reminding us that spaceflight was a perilous business. In Fishman’s “One Giant Leap,” the veteran space journalist ably explains the challenges facing NASA engineers as they sought to overtake their accomplished Soviet counterparts.

NASA was two years old when John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election. Incoming Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was tasked with finding a new boss for the agency, but the strongwilled Texan couldn’t “convince any of his first 19 choices to take the nation’s senior space job,” Fishman writes. Months later, when Kennedy proposed sending astronauts to the moon by the end of the ’60s, America “had 15 minutes and 22 seconds of experience flying an astronaut in a spacecraft.”

Big spending hikes — NASA’s budget, less than $1 billion in 1961, hit $5 billion in ’65 — attracted ample talent. At the program’s height, 400,000 people worked on Apollo missions for the government and its contractors. Their diligence was remarkable. “Inside the memory portion of that onecubicfoot box that was the Apollo Guidance Computer,” Fishman writes, “… there were 589,824 wires,” and each “was threaded by hand.”

Fishman’s is the most comprehensive of the three titles, and that’s not always a good thing. His crucial first chapter is weighed down by extraneous details about spacethemed TV series. And though he makes a solid case that Apollo “launched America into the Digital Age,” his closing argument is repetitive and gratingly triumphalist. “Americans created the internet. Americans decoded the genome. American spaceships leap the solar system,” he writes, adding, “That is the spirit of America, and it is the essence of the American dream.”

By contrast, Brandon R. Brown’s “The Apollo Chronicles” is circumspect about the space race’s longterm benefits. He acknowledges that “Earthorbiting satellites have had a deep and pervasive impact,” but believes that if Apollo never happened, computers “would probably have still lit our homes with ghostly blue light in the 1980s and 1990s.”

A University of San Francisco physics professor, Brown handles complex concepts in relatable ways. How did NASA prepare its craft for extreme temperatures?

When “a special type of sun shield” didn’t pan out, he writes, an engineer suggested “slowly rotating the entire craft, spinning one full revolution every hour”; this became known as “barbecue mode.”

Brown has a personal connection to the story — his father was an Apollo engineer — and he deftly documents its human dimensions. In the 1960s, he writes, NASA engineers couldn’t dine with African American colleagues at just any Houston restaurant — some were still segregated. Meanwhile, “the engineering workforce in

The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America’s First Moon Missions By Brandon R. Brown Oxford

(288 pages, $29.95) Moonbound: Apollo 11 and the Dream of Spaceflight By Jonathan Fetter-Vorm Hill & Wang

(256 pages, $19.95) One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon Charles Fishman Simon & Schuster (480 pages, $29.99)

the Soviet Union enjoyed a much higher percentage of women than” the U.S.

Brown’s account of the 1967 fire that killed three Apollo 1 astronauts — one of the decade’s several NASA tragedies — takes us inside the wounded agency. Staffers grieved, and the mission was ripped in the press. But several “engineers say that the disaster, a clear demonstration of the stakes, drew a new level of focus from younger employees in particular,” Brown writes. Though his book ends with a somewhat redundant chapter, it’s generally quite insightful.

Spaceflight is especially compelling when depicted in a visual medium. We’ve seen this at the movies — and we see it again in Jonathan FetterVorm’s illuminating graphic novel about Apollo 11 and the centurieslong evolution of astronomy.