Chasing the Moon: The Story of the Space Race - from Arthur C. Clarke to the Apollo landings

Chasing the Moon: The Story of the Space Race - from Arthur C. Clarke to the Apollo landings
Robert Stone

Alan Andres

Chasing the Moon thoroughly reimagines the race to the moon, upending much of the conventional mythology. With newly revealed stories about the moon race, from its earliest days to the monumental achievement of the lunar landing in 1969, the book features a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in these historic events.Utilising a wealth of previously overlooked and lost archival material, much of which has never before been revealed to the public, the Space Age is recast as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama in this fascinating new book.Among those included are astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman and Bill Anders; Sergei Khrushchev, son of the former Soviet premier and a leading Soviet rocket engineer; Poppy Northcutt, a 25-year old ‘mathematics whiz’ who gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA’s Mission Control; and Ed Dwight, the Air Force pilot selected by the Kennedy administration to train as America’s first black astronaut.

COPYRIGHT (#uff4e5a1e-34e7-5ad7-87dd-dfbab88ceb8d)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

First published in the United States by Ballentine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York

Copyright © Alan Andres and Robert Stone

Insert photos courtesy of NASA unless otherwise indicated

“AMERICAN EXPERIENCE”™ is a trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation.

Used with permission

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Tom Lehrer for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Wernher von Braun” by Tom Lehrer, copyright © 1965 by Tom Lehrer. Reprinted by permission of the author

Alan Andres and Robert Stone assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image © Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008307875

eBook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008307851

Version: 2019-05-30

For my mother, who awakened her ten-year-old son in the middle of an English midsummer night to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make history as they walked on the Moon.

—R.S.

For Charlie, older brother and teenage rocket scientist, who, as the youngest accredited journalist covering the launch of Apollo 14, backpacked and hitchhiked 1200 miles to Cape Kennedy.

— A.A.

CONTENTS

COVER (#uf189cad2-8690-5b00-afe6-8758e6975863)

TITLE PAGE (#u8be87948-2345-5cf6-8a99-8fb9c26f2dd6)

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION (#u4cb47a89-7bc7-53ee-84db-8c2783cca36c)

PROLOGUE JULY 16, 1969

CHAPTER ONE A PLACE BEYOND THE SKY (1903–1950)

CHAPTER TWO THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON (1952–1960)

CHAPTER THREE THE NEW FRONTIER (1961–1963)

CHAPTER FOUR WELCOME TO THE SPACE AGE (1964–1966)

CHAPTER FIVE EARTHRISE (1967–1968)

CHAPTER SIX MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION (1969)

CHAPTER SEVEN THE FINAL FRONTIER (1970–1979)

APPENDIX AFTER A FEW MORE REVOLUTIONS AROUND THE SUN

PICTURE SECTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ABOUT THE TYPE

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#uff4e5a1e-34e7-5ad7-87dd-dfbab88ceb8d)

JULY 16, 1969 (#uff4e5a1e-34e7-5ad7-87dd-dfbab88ceb8d)

THE SUN BEGAN rising over the northeast coast of Florida on what would be a humid subtropical mid-July morning. The brown pelicans swooping over the dunes sensed the day was anything but typical. Parked tightly together on the sides of the narrow roads to the beaches and causeways were thousands of cars and campers. The air carried the thrumming sound of helicopters ferrying visitors to the Kennedy Space Center. Since shortly after sunrise, all the roads to the Cape had become clogged with traffic.

Nearly a million people were gathering under the harsh Florida sun to witness the departure of the first humans to attempt a landing on another world, the Earth’s moon, 239,000 miles away. Should it be successful, the piloted lunar landing would culminate a decade of mounting anticipation.