A Man on the Moon, the book which inspired HBO's miniseries From the Earth to the Moon

When President Barack Obama’s administration announced in early 2010 that it was canceling Project Constellation, the next manned-spaceflight program which was supposed to take American astronauts back to the Moon and – eventually – on to Mars, I couldn’t help but think that John F. Kennedy – to whom Obama had often been compared during the 2008 Presidential race – would be extremely disappointed with America’s lack of determination and “can-do” spirit as far as space exploration is concerned.

Though Obama is a Democratic President as was the late JFK, he and his advisers are – depending on one’s point of view – pragmatic realists who are dealing with two wars overseas, the Great Recession, the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a lack of bipartisan support in Washington, or bleeding heart liberals who are willing to tax and spend billions of taxpayer dollars on a wrong-headed mission to create a “socialist” welfare state along the lines of those in Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Although I tend to pin the blame on all of us Americans for not showing much more than token support for the space program once the NASA rocket scientists fulfilled Kennedy’s dream of “landing a man on the moon and returning safely to Earth” in 10 years or less, much of the fault of why we have no Big Dreams for Space can also be attributed to such realities as the Vietnam War’s staggering costs, the cutting of NASA’s budget by Congress led by both parties even as the Apollo Program was still in progress.

As someone who has been fascinated with the space program ever since I watched the first moon landing as a wide-eyed six-year-old boy, the slow decline of America’s space program from the glory days of Apollo to being relegated to having astronauts hitch rides from the Russians once the Space Shuttle is retired in late 2010 is a keen disappointment.

Although I have several documentaries (When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, For All Mankind) and the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon) I had never owned a book dedicated to the Apollo Program until I bought Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts.

If you have watched the miniseries co-produced by Tom Hanks and many of the minds behind Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific, you may have seen that the main title credits include one that says Based in part on A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin. Seeing this tag every time I watched From the Earth to the Moon was the catalyst behind my decision to purchase it.

Because the first (1994) edition of Chaikin’s book was published around the same time Ron Howard was filming his fact-based film Apollo 13, Hanks read it while he was playing the role of astronaut Jim Lovell, and he found it so informative yet full of human drama that he chose it as the main literary source for the 10 part miniseries.

Naturally, the exigencies of television drama resulted in quite a few divergences from Chaikin’s book; in A Man on the Moon there are no separate chapters about the lunar module, or a probing look at the astronauts' wives or the fictional news broadcaster Emmet Seaborn’s rivalry with a wet-nosed up-and-coming TV reporter with more ambition than sense of ethics.

Nevertheless, if you read Chaikin’s book after watching Hanks’ miniseries, you will notice that From the Earth to the Moon took many of the astronauts’ personal experiences during the 10 flights to Earth’s only satellite from the pages of A Man on the Moon.

The 2007 edition, which was published to coincide with the Golden Anniversary of the launch of Sputnik – the event which heralded the Space Age and shocked America into supporting the creation of NASA and the various manned flight programs which followed – reflects the book’s synergy with From the Earth to the Moon via a foreword by Tom Hanks.

A Man on the Moon is divided into 13 chapters, which are distributed in three separate parts and are supplemented by a Prologue (analogous to From the Earth to the Moon’s Part One: Can We Do This?), the original edition’s epilogue and a 2007 afterword (“A People Without Limits,” which I find sadly ironic in the wake of President Obama’s decision to cancel Constellation), and the usual appendices, bibliography and author’s notes section which are standard issue in books of this nature.

The book, of course, covers a decade’s worth of the American space program’s history, starting with President Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in 1962 and ending with the final Moon landing (Apollo 17) in December of 1972.

This makes A Man on the Moon a seemingly daunting book to read – from Prologue to Afterword the page count is a mind-bending 596 pages (not including Hanks’ foreword or the references/index sections at the end).

Yet, for its breadth of coverage and amount of pages, Chaikin’s book (which took him 11 years to complete from inception to finish) is a very readable piece of nonfiction literature that tells the very human story of the Apollo astronauts and the many technicians who experienced all the triumphs and disappointments inherent in the course of meeting JFK’s deadline of landing a man on the moon “before the decade is out.”

Chaikin wisely avoids the overuse of NASA/astronautics/piloting jargon except when it is absolutely necessary; in chapters dealing with the first lunar landing and the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission we see quite a few terms along the lines of MAIN BUS B UNDERVOLT or “1201 Alarm”. When jargon or technical detail is needed to explain certain situations, Chaikin explains them clearly and concisely without making the reader feel like he or she needs to have a Ph.D in applied aeronautics.

Another mistake Chaikin assiduously evades is the exhaustive “play by play” narrative of every Apollo mission from launch to splashdown. This is because – with rare exceptions such as the lightning bolts which hit Apollo 12 as it cleared the tower in November of 1969 – launches were usually impressive but pretty routine events from the astronauts’ point of view. Thus, many chapters begin in mid-mission at varying stages of the flight.

You may have come across non-fiction books with blurbs that claim to be so well-written they read like the best novels or are “riveting” or “fascinating.” Sometimes, of course, this is Public Relations BS, but in the case of A Man on the Moon it is the truth.

Not only is A Man on the Moon exquisitely researched and deemed to be – by the Los Angeles Times’ reviewer – “the Authoritative masterpiece”, but it also brings to the fore the vast range of personalities of the astronauts who flew to the Moon. Readers who were not around in the 1960s and 1970s or were – as I was – too young to really remember will see personality profiles of the reticent Neil Armstrong, the “ladies’ man” Jack Swigert, the fun-loving and hard-swearing Pete Conrad, who when situations got tricky cursed like a sailor and the astronauts’ lone “true scientist” Jack Schmitt, who was one of the last two men to walk on the Moon.

So even if you haven’t watched From the Earth to the Moon, this fine narrative of what has been called the greatest human achievement of the 20th Century is a must read, if only to recapture, however briefly, a period of time in which the American “can do” spirit prevailed over war, social upheavals and political divisiveness.

© 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados.  All Rights Reserved