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Reaching for the Moon
- Short History of the Space Race
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 7 hrs
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Reaching for the Moon
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Summary
Fifty years after the Moon landing, a new history of the space race explores the lives of both Soviet and American engineers.
At the dawn of the space age, technological breakthroughs in Earth orbit flight were both breathtaking feats of ingenuity and disturbances to a delicate global balance of power. In this short book, aerospace historian Roger D. Launius concisely and engagingly explores the driving force of this era: the race to the Moon. Beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1, in October 1957, and closing with the end of the Apollo program in 1972, Launius examines how early space exploration blurred the lines between military and civilian activities, and how key actions led to space firsts as well as crushing failures.
Launius places American and Soviet programs on equal footing - following American aerospace engineers Wernher von Braun and Robert Gilruth, their Soviet counterparts Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov - to highlight key actions that led to various successes, failures, and ultimately the American Moon landing.
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Jeeves by another name
- 17-07-23
Disappointing retrospective
I've read several different histories of Apollo and the space race, and found this one very disappointing. Two particular features stuck out for me:
1. It felt like it had been badly edited - the author repeats himself on several occasions which would have been caught by a good editor.
2. It reads less like a history of what happened as a retrospective sneer at the attitudes of 50 years ago. Everything is interpreted through the lens of 2019 and our modern cultural norms.
I would not recommend this as a starting point for anyone looking to learn about Apollo. It was a shock to see the author is a highly commended NASA historian - I would not have assumed so if this were the only piece of work I sampled. He knows his stuff, so I can only assume he was under the pressure to meet a deadline (Apollo's 50th anniversary).
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