Scan barcode
A review by steakpatrol
Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger
5.0
Kluger's telling of the Apollo 8 mission is suffused with all of the drama inherent in exploration, and the associated risk. The story traces discrete developments in NASA's space exploration capabilities (e.g. the jerry-rigged monstrosity of a Lunar Excursion Module), building on one another in aid of increasingly ambitious mission objectives, with the pressure to move quickly against the backdrop of the Cold War.
The story deftly balances engineering particulars with climactic emotional arcs. Readers will learn about things that did actually go wrong, which provides a fascinating 'reset' if one perceived these exercises as being perfect maneuvers of precision that come off without a hitch (e.g. astronaut Jim Lovell accidentally inflating his life vest 45 minutes after takeoff and not being able to deflate it as it would create unsafe levels of carbon dioxide). This also goes a long way to clarifying why mission procedure and spacecrafts are designed the way that they are - the layers of complexity involved and the margin for error.
Some of the errors the story highlights rise to catastrophe. In the lines of the subsequent pages, in mission procedure and engineering oversight, there is etched the heartache of the human loss.
Kluger's story effectively takes these losses, and the work that went into mitigating the risk, out of the abstract, making it painstakingly real. Once it covers the lead-up to Apollo 8, and the lives of its astronauts, families, and NASA support staff, it crafts a thrilling voyage on the page. It will captivate anyone drawn into the romance of space exploration, and whose mind has pondered all of that which led up to humanity maintaining an international space station, and developing reusable rockets.
The story deftly balances engineering particulars with climactic emotional arcs. Readers will learn about things that did actually go wrong, which provides a fascinating 'reset' if one perceived these exercises as being perfect maneuvers of precision that come off without a hitch (e.g. astronaut Jim Lovell accidentally inflating his life vest 45 minutes after takeoff and not being able to deflate it as it would create unsafe levels of carbon dioxide). This also goes a long way to clarifying why mission procedure and spacecrafts are designed the way that they are - the layers of complexity involved and the margin for error.
Some of the errors the story highlights rise to catastrophe. In the lines of the subsequent pages, in mission procedure and engineering oversight, there is etched the heartache of the human loss.
Kluger's story effectively takes these losses, and the work that went into mitigating the risk, out of the abstract, making it painstakingly real. Once it covers the lead-up to Apollo 8, and the lives of its astronauts, families, and NASA support staff, it crafts a thrilling voyage on the page. It will captivate anyone drawn into the romance of space exploration, and whose mind has pondered all of that which led up to humanity maintaining an international space station, and developing reusable rockets.