Book Review: Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11

Book jacket design: Greg Kulick. © 2019 Little, Brown and Company (Hachette Group)

On July 20, 2019, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA), historians, and millions of space enthusiasts around the world commemorated the Jubilee of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon. To observe the 50th anniversary of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk - and the fulfillment of the late President John F. Kennedy's challenge to land a man on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor and return him to Earth before 1970, a wave of new movies (First Man), documentaries (Apollo 11) and books preceded the commemoration of the greatest adventure in human history: the Space Race and the triumph of the Apollo Program.

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11, historian James Donovan's 464-page account of the Apollo Program, its Cold War roots, and America's bid to land men on the Moon before the Soviet Union, is one of the many literary explorations of a time in which a young President reached into the future and inspired Americans to boldly go where no one had gone before.

Command Module Pilot Michael Collins designed the mission patch for Apollo 11, which was refined by NASA artists. Note that this patch does not include the astronauts' names, reflecting Collins' intent to honor the 400,000 Americans who worked for nearly 10 years on Project Apollo and its mission to fulfill JFK's challenge to land men on the Moon and return them safely to Earth "before the decade is out."  Mission Patch Design by NASA

Divided into four parts and seventeen chapters, Shoot for the Moon covers the 11 years of the Space Race, a Cold War contest that began as the United States' response to the Russians' successful bid to launch the first artificial satellite (Sputnik I) into Earth orbit on October 4, 1957. It ended, of course, on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong radioed back to the tense controllers at Mission Control in Houston, Texas with the words: "Houston, Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed."

When the alarm went off forty thousand feet above the moon's surface, both astronauts looked down at the computer to see 1202 flashing on the readout. Neither of them knew what it meant, and time was running out...

ON JULY 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. One of the world's greatest technological achievements – and a triumph of American spirit and ingenuity –the Apollo 11 mission was a mammoth undertaking involving more than 410,000 men and women dedicated to winning the space race against the Soviets. 

Set amid the tensions of the Cold War and the upheavals of the sixties, and filled with first-person, behind-the-scenes details, Shoot for the Moon is a gripping account of the dangers, the challenges, and the sheer determination that defined not only Apollo 11, but also the Mercury and Gemini missions that came before it. From the shock of Sputnik and the heart-stopping final minutes of John Glenn's Mercury flight to the deadly whirligig of Gemini 8, the doomed Apollo 1 mission, and that perilous landing on the Sea of Tranquility– when the entire world held its breath while Armstrong and Aldrin battled computer alarms, low fuel, and other problems- James Donovan tells the whole story.  – Publisher's dust jacket blurb, Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11

My Take

I was six years old in 1969. That year, three Apollo missions flew nine American astronauts to the Moon; one (Apollo 10) was a "dress rehearsal" in which every step of a lunar mission except the landing was made, while the other two (Apollos 11 and 12) landed four astronauts at two different landing sites. As a result, I became fascinated with space exploration and, even as a young boy, followed the Apollo Program from that point to its conclusion three years later with the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972.

James Donovan. Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger

Author and historian James Donovan (The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo–and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation and A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn-the Last Great Battle of the American West) gives readers a fast-paced and riveting account of the American space program and its most significant achievement from 1958 to just after Apollo 11's triumphant return to Earth in late July 1969. Intended for readers who came of age in a world where NASA and other countries' manned exploration of space has not ventured beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, Shoot for the Moon is written in a lively, easy to follow style that gives the average reader an overview of Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo without bogging the narrative down with too much technical jargon.

At the same time, although Shoot the Moon is not as detailed as Apollo 13 by James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger or Andrew Chaikin's A Man on the Moon, it does give buffs many details that they may not have read before, such as the revelation that the Soviets were still trying to develop a booster capable of carrying cosmonauts to the Moon and back before Apollo 11; due to the secretive nature of the Communist regime then in power in Moscow, many of these details are absent from many books and films about Apollo, especially those that came out between 1969 and the early 1990s.

The only problem I have with Shoot the Moon is Donovan's penchant to not use proper style when referring to the armed services of the United States in his text. While it is true that NASA is a civilian agency and Apollo was a civilian government program, most of the astronauts and controllers who participated in the Moon missions were either active-duty military officers or, in the case of Neil Armstrong and flight controller Gene Kranz, ex-military pilots. Thus, I found it grating to see that Donovan never uses the official style for identifying the armed services; instead of stating that Gus Grissom was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, say, Donovan writes it as "a lieutenant colonel in the air force."

It's a minor issue, to be sure, but an annoying one that often took me out of the book. It was some time before I taught myself to ignore it, and I hope that the publisher (Little, Brown and Company) will correct the error in future printings.

That aside, though, Shoot for the Moon is an entertaining and fascinating glimpse at a time in history when American inventiveness and political willpower combined to fulfill one of humanity's greatest quests: to conquer space and go to the Moon "in peace for all mankind."