mondojohnson

I never tire of the Apollo 11 story, even in this 40th anniversary year that produced a deluge of memorial films, books and articles. It (and the birth of Sesame Street) remains a distinct childhood memory, though I was only four years old. Rocket Men is an excellent and authoritative retelling of the amazing achievement, a must-read for space freaks.

Hardcore Apollo nerds like myself will already know most of the mission details recounted in this book, but that doesn’t stop it from being a gripping page-turner — even when it dips back into history to review Operation Paperclip and the frantic poaching of Nazi scientists after the war. The story all unfolds at a gripping pace, using the official mission timeline (“T-minus”, etc) often in the voices of the engineers and astronauts that made it happen.

In fact, that’s one of the best aspects of the book: the engineers are given a more complete voice than they are usually afforded on those “History Channel” shows. Another commendable feature of Rocket Men is the respectful depth given to the portrait of Mike Collins — the affably humble Command Module pilot who is so often eclipsed by Buzz & Neil in accounts of the Great Leap.

The book ends by reminding us of our baffling abandonment of manned space-flight, though it does so in a way that inspires rather than scolds.

Perhaps with the discovery of all that water, we’ll finally go back? I hope so. The next humans on the moon are more likely to be Chinese or Indian than American, at this point. I don’t care which, I just hope they build a little campground that can be visited by mere mortals like me.