A man on the moon: the voyages of the Apollo astronauts

Man on the Moon

A Great Leap of Wonder, Born of Innumerable Tiny Steps

Every page of A Man on the Moon demonstrates both Andrew Chaikin's lifelong love for the Apollo Program and the eight years he spent researching its fine details. At first (and to be honest, second) glance, the book appears not so much closely argued as densely documented, with every incident reconstructed from interviews and mission recordings and then arranged in chronological order -- often with time stamps to further authenticate each event as a tiny, isolated stage in the gigantic process of sending human beings to the moon.

The effect can be daunting and even off-putting at first, but soon Chaikin starts revealing the larger purpose behind the minutia. Once again, the process is gradual and incremental, but by the end of the book, he clearly spells his argument out. All the details are here not so much for their own sake, but because in the aggregate they help to recreate (as closely as possible) the experience of being an Apollo astronaut or rather, interestingly, all of the Apollo astronauts and all the engineers, administrators, and floor technicians who made their flights possible. This is an attempt to tell "the story of the lunar voyages that the astronauts never wrote" from a revolving perspective: drifting from one viewpoint to another with an apparently effortless freedom from gravity, writing the book that it would've taken all of its characters to write.

Of course, the "book" that the crew and astronauts of the Apollo Program actually "wrote" was the program itself, those flights written in rocket fuel and steel, acceleration and death, blast and silence and wonder. Chaikin acknowledges that his book is only a substitute for the real thing, but given the slow decline of the space program -- his "Epilogue" to Apollo is essentially our lives -- the vicarious substitute is all he (and we) have left. "Until someone follows in their still-preserved footsteps," he writes, "we are left to make the journey in our imaginations. It is a journey we [emphasis mine] can make."

Beyond all the archival detail, this is the story Chaikin knows he really needs to tell: the imaginary journey, the courage that the Kennedy generation had to undertake a great deed, transcend its own technological limitations, and explore a previously impossible frontier. The facts are what got the astronauts to the moon alive; every smallest aspect of every mission was checked and rechecked with greater care than Chaikin checks his own interview transcripts. They need to be preserved so future generations can see how it was done. But he keeps coming back to the "wonder" that the facts made possible -- the thesis that all the evidence and sources of eight years of work, endless interviews, appendices, notes support.