Fishman, Donovan, Brinkley's Apollo 11 Books Highlights The Mission of the Moon's Legacy: NPR



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The American flag is the only one on the surface of the moon.

NASA / Getty Images


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NASA / Getty Images

The American flag is the only one on the surface of the moon.

NASA / Getty Images

The countdown has begun. It remains about a month before the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 – and the first and famous steps of humanity on another world.

As a thank you for this feat and the last five years, a flotilla of books has also been launched, exploring the history of Apollo and raising questions about its ultimate legacy. By browsing through some of these works, it quickly becomes clear to what extent the achievements of America with Apollo were singular. Even more pressing, however, these books show that – half a century later – we are still trying to understand its long-term significance for our country and the world.

If you are looking for a good narrative of the history of the inhabited space program, you should start with that of James Donovan. Shoot for the Moon: The space race and the extraordinary journey of Apollo 11. From the American panic that followed the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957, Donovan successfully traced the path taken by the United States to get to Apollo 11. Once President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 , that America would reach the moon before the end of the decade, NASA found itself on the hook for inventing the space travel on the fly.

Donovan travels the reader through the lines of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, more dangerous and daring than each other. Donovan knows how to tell a captivating story. At each launch or failure, NASA's engineers, managers, and astronauts pushed a little further the great experience that is manned spaceflight. They had to first learn how human beings would even react to space. Then comes the learning of the rendezvous and docking of two ships in orbit. The next lessons were how to leave Earth's orbit, navigate around the moon and return to safety.

At each step, Donovan tells us stories of choice about people on the border, such as how astronaut Buzz Aldrin has been campaigning to make these famous first steps. NASA, however, preferred the symbolism of an astronaut not part of the military making this giant step for mankind. So, says Donovan, it's Neil Armstrong, a civilian test pilot, who got the nod. To his credit, Aldrin, whom Donovan described as "a loner participating in a team sport," accepted the decision gracefully.

However, if you are interested in how the United States embarked on the improbable mission of getting people on the moon when it was difficult for them to get a rocket, then Douglas Brinkley American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the great race to space can be reading for you. The subtitle of the book reveals everything you need to know about its purpose. Kennedy's biography, part of the history of political space, Brinkley's book clearly shows that the launch of the Apollo program was to beat the Russians. As Brinkley's book shows, the president who has had the greatest impact on the exploration of space is, according to him, not "in space". What American Moonshot shows however that Kennedy was a daring and clever politician who understood that putting Apollo in motion meant going beyond Russia's considerable capabilities in space by 1961. By setting the moon as an American goal, Kennedy was throwing a glove whose consequences bloomed far beyond its political origins of the Cold War.

Understanding these consequences and putting their story in context is Charles Fishman via A giant leap: The impossible mission that transported us to the moon. While Fishman is interested in the origins of the space race and the problem-solving mechanisms that brought us there, he is equally interested in how Apollo has transformed us . The race to the moon was, in his words, "the largest civilian project ever undertaken, not only the Manhattan Project, but also the Panama Canal and the transcontinental railroad". Fishman thus wants us to see Apollo as part of a social revolution as profound as all the others that occurred in the sixties.

For starters, the magnitude of what NASA needed and needed to do in management technologies was its own kind of revolution. Fishman explained how, in the early 1960s, when Russia was the first to place satellites and humans in orbit, it was not entirely clear that democracies had the ability to handle the determined goal needed the development of a space program. But in 1968, NASA could be considered "the 4th largest organization in the country in terms of employees, ahead of all companies except GM, Ford and GE," says Fishman. Work with such success on this scale and At the most merciless and ruthless point of technology was a revolution of its kind that validated American forms of democracy and capitalism.

For Fishman, however, Apollo's most important and least understood success lies in the digital realm. A giant leap Spends considerable time and well used to demonstrate the role of NASA in the birth of digital technologies now ubiquitous. When the race for the moon began, "integrated circuits" – that is, computer chips – were an uncertain technology. But NASA realized that they would be essential to their need for "real-time" computing, where machine responses had to follow only a few seconds after questioning. As shown by Fishman, NASA drove this technology, buying 60% of all integrated circuits manufactured in 1963. Most importantly, NASA's stringent requirements have led chips to 100% reliability, which means that they could fly lunar landers and ultimately make calculations that make the GPS on your phone so accurate.

Fishman finishes his book with a long mediation on what this civil project, realized in full light of the public transparency (Russia did not reveal anything of its launches as long as they are not finished), destined to the whole world. He concluded that it was important that the United States go to the moon – and not to the totalitarian system represented by the USSR – citing Neil deGrasse Tyson: "No other acts of violence". Human exploration never laid a plaque saying "We come in peace for all humanity". "

Through his vision, reach and the creation of a new relationship between people and technology, Apollo has transformed the world. As Fishman points out, Apollo was both "victory and success". This is a lesson that we all would do well to remember half a century later.

Adam Frank is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and author of Starlight: Extraterrestrial Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. You can find more Adam here: @ adamfrank4.

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