Book Review: Rocket Men: the epic story of the first men on the Moon (2009) by Craig Nelson

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I bought this very excellent book some time ago when I saw it in a 60% off sale, and, ironically, I had started reading it just before the recent death of Neil Armstrong. Even though we know that Armstrong successfully landed his Apollo 11 Lunar Lander, when Nelson describes that prolonged, tense search for a safe landing spot while running low on landing fuel, it holds one in suspense.
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Nelson rivets your attention on the first page and doesn’t let up. He documents the unprecedented scale of the Space Race effort and provides great background on the Missile Race, the German scientists and Cold War. He gives detailed descriptions of the long hard work by the 400,000-strong team of scientists, engineers, astronauts, and aerospace industry workers – who overcame continuous obstacles to do the seemingly impossible.
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This book is a great companion to Andrew Chaikin’s earlier book on the entire Apollo program, A Man on the Moon (1994), which I reviewed two years ago here. Nelson’s Rocket Men focuses on the Apollo 11 flight and the effort leading up to it, while Chaikin had also documented the later flights of Apollo 12-17 with each of their individual dangers and discoveries. There is not as much overlap as one would expect between the two books, they complement each other well, and both are exciting reads.
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I highly recommend Rocket Men, especially now that the first man to step on the Moon has just died and passed into history. Although I had been a huge fan and close follower of the Mercury program in the early 1960s, I had been out of the loop for a while. I had never heard of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin or Mike Collins when, in late July 1969, I was on Bunker 6, Hill 34, Quang Nam Province during the middle of a quiet moonlit night; our sergeant called up and told me, “The astronauts just landed on the Moon, man!” I looked up at the Moon and thought to myself, “Those guys are in more danger then I am at this particular moment.”
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After a poor start with early humiliating failures and later tragic deaths, the space program gained accelerating momentum and really did get off the ground – all the way to the Moon and back again. Heroic and inspiring work.
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-Zenwind.
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