Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Fine unread condition dark blue boards, black spine, and red spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Craig Nelson; Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Quotes; Preliminary Page Quotes of Exchange Between Rhode Island Senator John Pastore and Femiilab Physicist Robert Wilson; Acknowledgments; Notes; Sources and Index. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates. "I grew up thinking man was destined to go to the Moon. After reading Craig Nelson's Rocket Men, I now know how tenuous, scary, and human the space program actually was. This book gives us hope that America can once again find a way to accomplish the seemingly impossible." - Nathaniel Philbrick, author. "For the first time, an award-winning historian tells the full story of the space and missile race and its dramatic conclusion: the first moment when humans set foot on the moon. On May 20, 1969, the thirty-story-high Apollo 11 Saturn V spaceship was trundled from Cape Kennedy's Vehicle Assembly Building to the distant loneliness of Pad 39A for its final inspection and countdown. The missile had 6 million parts, which meant that, under NASA's rigorous insistence of 99.9 percent reliability, as many as 6,000 could fail. The nearly 1 million spectators who began gathering at Cape Kennedy for launch on July 16, 1969, were kept at least 3.5 miles away from the pad because, in an explosion, hundred-pound chunks of shrapnel would be hurled in a 3-mile radius with 4/5 the power of an atomic bomb. Finally, at 9:32 a.m., Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins lifted into the skies on the greatest adventure in modern history: the first trip to the Moon. Restoring the drama, majesty, and sheer improbability of an American triumph that has now come to be taken for granted, Rocket Men is the complete, definitive, and thrilling account of that glorious achievement, from the origins of NASA's spaceships as Nazi wonder weapons to the lives of the men and women who created this miracle. When President Kennedy proposed a Moon landing within a decade as the most effective way to take the lead in the space race after the shocking Soviet achievements of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin's first manned orbit, even NASA's most zealous engineers were aghast. But thanks to a stunning and unprecedented effort of planning, technology, and execution, the Eagle lunar module successfully touched down on the Moon's surface, and a starstruck world watched as Armstrong took his astonishing small step. Through interviews, 23,000 pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson offers a grippingly vivid and detailed narrative of the Apollo 11 mission, from its crew's inconceivably arduous training to the stresses of finding themselves media stars on the global stage after their return, from the mundane (the astronauts' final breakfast on earth was steak and eggs) to the remarkable (the lunar samples brought to earth by the Apollo missions revealed the Moon's origins) to the unintentionally comic (NASA designers had neglected to place a handle on Eagle's outside door, which meant that Armstrong and Aldrin had to make sure to leave it open while they walked on the Moon). Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history. But the story of Apollo 11 is, in the end, fundamentally a human one, featuring the genuinely heroic - and idiosyncratic - astronauts, their stoic wives, distracted children, and the ground crew huddled at Mission Control, all of whom are unforgettable characters in this thrilling account of the journey to one of the last frontiers of the human imagination. It is a book to make you cheer for what mankind can accomplish in spite of nearly insurmountable odds." - from the jacket flaps.…