Moonshot

Maybe the problem with Apollo was that going to the Moon looked too easy. As Dan Parry recounts in Moonshot, a successful touchdown was far from guaranteed.

As Neil Armstrong guided the Lunar Module downwards, his planned landing site turned out to be littered with boulders so the spacecraft flew onwards at 3,000mph. As the pair drifted miles further into uncharted territory, they had less than 30 seconds of fuel left, not to mention a computer alarm to contend with.

Armstrong famously did land his craft safely and the rest is history. But the rest of the billion or so people listening in to the transmissions had no inkling how close the first lunar landing had come to an abort – or worse. NASA saw it as in its interest to downplay any danger because it wanted to go on flying more missions, but ironically it was the perceived lack of drama that killed interest in future lunar exploration – only six landings were completed out of the 10 that were originally planned. With four decades worth of hindsight, however, we know that Apollo 11 lacked neither drama nor danger, as Parry’s enthralling retelling makes plain.

The book’s subtitle, 'The Inside Story of Mankind’s Greatest Adventure', is slightly misleading as Parry is a TV producer (he was responsible for ITV’s Apollo docudrama) rather than a true space insider. He has, however, talked personally to Armstrong, Aldrin and other key personnel, as well as sifted through a plethora of previous books, archives and other Apollo material. Not that its billing should detract from what is a compelling novelistic account of Apollo 11’s seven-day journey there and back.

Clearly a labour of love, Moonshot is crammed with surprising details, but the book’s readability never suffers. Among the eye-openers: the paper-thin hull of the Lunar Module was incapable of supporting its own fully-fuelled weight under Earth gravity; the Sun-drenched lunar surface had a temperature of more than 100°C during the part of the lunar day when Apollo 11 landed (yet the spacesuits worked perfectly); and the US TV transmissions added a six-second time delay in case something happened to the astronauts. As a TV professional, Parry is particularly good on the media aspects of the mission, including the fact that NASA experts at first decreed there would be no live TV from the Moon whatsoever.

An excellent account of this historic mission.



Sean Blair is a space writer who formerly worked for the European Space Agency