Foreword We began the interviews for Apollo in March 1986, forty years ago--a PhD in political science and a PhD in English literature interviewing aerospace engineers, aware of our ignorance but already fascinated by the story of manned spaceflight in the 1960s. We were entering an alien domain. In the domains where we were at home--public policy analysis for Charles, literary criticism for Catherine--what other people thought of our work was everything. It made the difference between career success and failure. For the people of Apollo, what other people thought of anyone''s work was meaningless. Either you got the engineering right or you didn''t. During flights, you produced the correct decisions at the time they were needed or you didn''t. Opinions and good intentions didn''t matter.
Only facts and performance mattered. To us, the ultimate test for the people of Apollo seemed terrifying. They were supposed to take a rocket the size and weight of a Navy destroyer with 7.5 million pounds of thrust out to a launchpad and light it with the entire world looking on. If it didn''t blow up and the spacecraft reached orbit, a separate engine had to put the spacecraft into the correct trajectory to traverse a quarter-million miles. When it arrived at the moon, a fragile landing craft had to descend to poorly understood terrain. And take off again. And rendezvous with the spacecraft.
Then the spacecraft had to be put on the correct trajectory to a reentry corridor a quarter of a million miles away and ten miles wide. And survive a 25,000 m.p.h. reentry that generated temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the heat shield. Every one of those steps had to work. Not "would have worked if only this one thing nobody could have anticipated hadn''t happened," but work no matter what. It was an alien domain indeed for a policy analyst and an English professor--and exhilarating.
We both look back on the four years we spent researching and writing Apollo as the most professional fun we ever had. We sent the last pieces of the manuscript to our publisher on February 20, 1989. Apollo reached bookstores in late June, in time for the twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11. The reviews came out in July. They were all positive, several were enthusiastic, and the review in the Washington Post was an outright rave. Then came the letdown. Like all authors, we had dreamed of a bestseller, but it was not to be. Sales were respectable but modest.
As the summer wore on, our spirits began to lift as we heard from the people of Apollo. Some of them were people we had interviewed, but most were not. The reaction we heard most often was that the book captured what being part of Apollo was like--the pressure, esprit, tension, and elation that set the Apollo decade apart from everything else in their lives. That''s exactly what we had set out to do. Hearing people who were at the center of Apollo tell us we had succeeded was deeply satisfying. After a few years, Apollo began to take on a second life. We got letters from people who had nothing to do with the space program who had fallen in love with the book. A Chinese edition was published, and a limited, leather-bound English version sold by subscription.
People wrote us trying to locate copies of Apollo, which had become scarce and commanded exorbitant prices. In conference panels and magazine articles about the space program, Apollo kept popping up as the book that people had to read if they wanted to understand how we got to the moon. In 2004, we made the book available once again, first with a new paperback edition that sold out and then with a Kindle edition in 2010. Now we have a beautiful new print edition from AEI Press--and, finally, a subtitle we like. We were never enthusiastic about the original subtitle, "The Race to the Moon," but we couldn''t think of anything better. Our 2004 edition had no subtitle at all. We think that the new one, "An American Epic," conveys the essence of the Apollo Program: epic in its dimensions and part of a distinctly American tradition that began with the Lewis and Clark Expedition and continued through the first transcontinental railway, the Panama Canal, and the Manhattan Project. Curiously, the right subtitle had been staring us in the face since we wrote the final sentence of the prologue.
Those of you who are approaching Apollo for the first time are very different from our readers in 1989. Then, most of our readers had been adults or at least teenagers during the 1960s, and even readers who had been children could remember the milieu. The setting for Apollo still looked familiar to readers in 1989. As of 2026, it does not. Accordingly, we have had to make some changes in the text lest our readers be perplexed. For example, we explained to our 1989 readers that the cathode-ray tubes in Mission Control were "the kind used in commercial television sets." In 2026, many readers have never used anything except flat screens. We wrote that "the computer capacity of the mainframe in the Control Center was smaller than that of some of the desktop systems of the 1980s, and the onboard computers in the command and lunar modules had less capacity than some modern pocket calculators.
" In 2026, those comparisons are ridiculous. Many of you are wearing watches with chips that are thousands of times faster and have tens of thousands of times more memory than Houston''s room-size IBM mainframe. In this edition, we have substituted "the computer capacity of the mainframe in the Control Center was incomprehensibly tiny by later standards--a few megabytes. The capacities of the computers in the command and lunar modules were measured in kilobytes." But we have kept such changes in the main text to a minimum. Apollo was written when almost all the major actors in the drama were still alive to speak to us, and we decided not to tamper with that perspective. We also decided not to update the epilogue that we wrote early in 1989. It is bittersweet to reread it now, when so many of the people we interviewed have died, but the epilogue conveys how intimately our descriptions of the building of the Saturn V, the fire on Apollo 1, the first landing on Apollo 11, and the rescue of Apollo 13 were grounded in the eyewitness testimony of the people who did these things.
They were calling upon memories of great events that were as vivid to them as your memories of your first love are to you. A reader in 2026 may be forgiven for wondering how these people could have even tried to go to the moon, let alone succeeded, with the primitive technology of the 1960s. The audacity of Apollo has become steadily more jaw-dropping as time goes on. Consider the case of Ron Howard''s film Apollo 13, released in 1995. The movie was meticulously accurate in almost everything. Why then do the scenes in Mission Control show charts and graphs on the flight controllers'' consoles? The flight controllers during the Apollo missions had nothing remotely like charts and graphs. They were looking at black screens filled with long columns of scrolling white numbers. Jerry Bostick, a Flight Operations veteran whom you will meet in the book, was a technical adviser on the film.
He complained to Howard, who replied that there are some things an audience just won''t accept--and computer displays as incomprehensible as the ones the flight controllers used are one of those things. That was in 1995. Now, the thought of relying on them seems crazy. We went to the moon with technology that in retrospect makes the enterprise look like a romantic, impetuous gamble. Impetuous it wasn''t. The Saturn V might not have had any nifty microprocessors on board--the microprocessor wasn''t invented until two years after the first lunar landing--but it worked every time, and its power dwarfed that of any subsequent launch vehicle for the next fifty years. The engineering of the command module and lunar module was so ingenious that it brought the crew of Apollo 13 home despite a catastrophic explosion. The flight operations system, invented from scratch for the space program, proved itself a model of how to make life-and-death decisions in seconds.
The proof of Apollo''s technical excellence is its record. But Apollo was indeed romantic and indeed a gamble. Today, it sounds like a story from long ago and far away, when people in the public eye took enormous risks and held nothing back. Often things went wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong, and still they did not falter or make excuses, but figured out what went wrong, fixed it, and proceeded--taking still more enormous risks. They covered ground in giant strides. Contemplate for a moment the bare bones of their timeline: On May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy committed the United States to a successful manned lunar mission before the decade was out. On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface--an elapsed time of eight years and eight weeks.
Imagine that on May 25, 2018, President Trump had committed the nation to send astronauts to Mars before the end of 2026. No one would have taken him seriously, because that''s not the way things work these days. In our world, what the people of Apollo accomplished is almost beyond imagining. Welcome to Apollo''s world.