In ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon (June 11, 2019/$29.99 hardcover)-publishing in time for the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing in July-bestselling author Charles Fishman delivers an all-new take on the race to the Moon that puts Apollo into a new perspective in American history.
Fishman, a veteran space reporter, has been writing about NASA and the space program for more than 30 years. In ONE GIANT LEAP, he puts together the Apollo story in a way it has never been told before. Yes, the Apollo astronauts are the well-known and well-deserved public heroes of the race to the Moon. But the astronauts didn't make the trip possible. It took 410,000 people to make the moon landings achievable. Every hour of spaceflight for Apollo required one million hours of work by scientists, engineers and factory workers-the equivalent of 10 lifetimes of work back on Earth. Fishman tells the story of the men and women who did the work to get the astronauts, and the country, to the Moon and back.
When President John F. Kennedy rallied the nation to go to the Moon in 1961, the task was impossible. None of the technology or techniques existed to do it. Engineers, scientists and factory workers in every state in the USA created that technology in just 8 years. They invented space travel on a deadline.
Fishman draws upon rarely tapped original source material from that era, including the memos and documents that NASA engineers wrote to each other, arguing their way through solving 10,000 problems. And he has interviewed dozens of people who actually did the work.
Fishman also argues two critical new insights from the history of NASA and 1960s America:
Apollo is sometimes adjudged a disappointment because it didn't usher in the Jetsons-like Space Age we thought it would. Fishman argues that the success of Apollo is the age we live in now-it opened the world to the digital revolution in ways that have never before been appreciated or written about. "The race to the Moon didn't usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age," he writes. "And that is as valuable a legacy as the imagined Space Age might have been." Fishman uses documents and data from the era to demonstrate how Apollo launched the computer age.
Fishman uses often overlooked information from the Kennedy Administration to argue that President Kennedy himself was losing enthusiasm for the Moon race and the Moon landing, and that if he had not been assassinated, it's not at all clear that Armstrong and Aldrin would have walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
ONE GIANT LEAP provides a sweeping, definitive account of the men and women charged with changing the world as we knew it, as they raced to complete one of humanity's greatest achievements.