One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon
The New York Times bestselling, “meticulously researched and absorbingly written” (The Washington Post) story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic Apollo 11 moon mission.
President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel.
When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience—with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than US astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send twenty-four astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.
“A veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch—nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote” (The Wall Street Journal) and in One Giant Leap, Fishman has written the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises—from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. “It’s been 50 years since Neil Armstrong took that one small step. Fishman explains in dazzling form just how unbelievable it actually was” (Newsweek).
President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel.
When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience—with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than US astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send twenty-four astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.
“A veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch—nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote” (The Wall Street Journal) and in One Giant Leap, Fishman has written the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises—from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. “It’s been 50 years since Neil Armstrong took that one small step. Fishman explains in dazzling form just how unbelievable it actually was” (Newsweek).
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Community Reviews
Bullet point review. What did I learn?
1. Apollo was the biggest civilian project pretty much ever. It was literally the second largest employer in the country and had more people working for it than were in Vietnam at its peak.
2. It was basically a war move – beat the Soviets in an all-out race to the moon. And people really felt like that at the time! In some never-exactly-defined-way people thought that if the Soviets won the race to the moon, that was dangerous not just bad for morale. But at some point, it eclipsed that in its meaning and became a singular symbol of human potential.
3. Eisenhower basically went around telling anyone who would listen it was a huge waste of money, and most scientists pretty much agreed.
4. At the time, it was completely insane for Kennedy to predict we’d land on the moon by the end of the decade. Like when he said that we didn’t even know how to get people off earth. The author argues that Kennedy sorta figured that out a year later and started to back down from the whole plan when he realized it cost so much he couldn’t have any of his other toys. I just think this is implicitly interesting idea – you get a visionary that puts this thing in motion, he probably wouldn’t have followed through because like it’s way harder than he thought it’d be. But then he gets assassinated so everyone else just actually follows through (I’ll cover this more down below).
5. It was tremendously difficult. For every hour of space flight during Apollo, people spent one million hours on the ground to make that happen. Woof.
6. The author also puts the technical Apollo project into perspective relative to trickier problems of poverty, education, civil rights, etc. that were being tackled at the same time. I wouldn’t call this a strength of the book, it feels a bit stretched, but I think it’s nice he took a shot at trying to distill some salient differences between the two types of problems.
7. That said, the book is basically about what human beings can accomplish when they unite behind a common purpose with dedicated resources. And that point about the common purpose seems to be the main factor. This should not have been possible in the time it was done and the thing that made it possible was that a lot of people tried to do the same thing because they felt it was right and important and even if they couldn’t they should try. I wonder what else we could be doing that with.
8. The biggest long-term impact really had nothing to do with space or any of the seven points above. It was that the program massively funded and perfected digital computing which then reshaped the terrestrial world. At one point, NASA was buying more than 95% of all integrated circuits and was subjecting those circuits to quality standards unlike anything that had ever existed before. Moore from Moore’s law? He was working on integrated circuits for NASA when he decided that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every 18 months. And he was working like hell at it.
Two other comments – one on detail the book does extremely well and the other on the author’s “Kennedy would have quit” speculation.
Toward the end of the book, the author explores some aspects of landing on the moon that are hard but might not seem hard – he puts a big exclamation point on just what a comically difficult thing this was to do. We get a full chapter on rendezvous in space and orbital mechanics and one on the lunar module, which by default could never be tested prior to use. These are really helpful reminders of just how technically challenging this was. Even something seemingly simple like “fly the ship to dock with the other ship” required a decade of math and left trained fighter pilots literally giving up after spending all their fuel and winding up farther from their target than they started. Human intuition does not work when you’re in space, but you can’t just turn it off. It’s fascinating to sit there and try to think about how ridiculous it is anyone ever thought they could solve all these problems.
The chapter on Kennedy strikes me as potential contentious, but I think it’s exactly the sort of thing a book length treatment can and should do do and the authors close textual analysis is thin but convincing, particularly when taking into account Kennedy’s broader personality. The author argues Kennedy launches headlong into the space race to the moon as only he could, but about a year later started to realize and dislike the political consequences of spending that amount of money every year for an event that wouldn’t even occur in his second term, if he won a second term. As a result, the author argues Kennedy started to change his mind. Slowly he was building an off-ramp that would have resulted in not going to the moon but declaring victory before that. The author presents a Kennedy who did not carefully assess the situation, but instead confidently plunged headlong into a battle that a mere year later he didn’t want to fight.
The startling conclusion - absent Kennedy’s assassination, maybe we aren’t on the moon in 1969. Maybe we still aren’t. One value of history is to reflect on how contingent many things actually are - how the inevitable and obvious in retrospect depends on a series of improbably events that could have gone quite differently. This is a speculative chapter – maybe speculative beyond the preferences of some readers. But I think it’s exactly the sort of stance an author like this has to take to fully allow his readers to interpret the history he has tried to present.
1. Apollo was the biggest civilian project pretty much ever. It was literally the second largest employer in the country and had more people working for it than were in Vietnam at its peak.
2. It was basically a war move – beat the Soviets in an all-out race to the moon. And people really felt like that at the time! In some never-exactly-defined-way people thought that if the Soviets won the race to the moon, that was dangerous not just bad for morale. But at some point, it eclipsed that in its meaning and became a singular symbol of human potential.
3. Eisenhower basically went around telling anyone who would listen it was a huge waste of money, and most scientists pretty much agreed.
4. At the time, it was completely insane for Kennedy to predict we’d land on the moon by the end of the decade. Like when he said that we didn’t even know how to get people off earth. The author argues that Kennedy sorta figured that out a year later and started to back down from the whole plan when he realized it cost so much he couldn’t have any of his other toys. I just think this is implicitly interesting idea – you get a visionary that puts this thing in motion, he probably wouldn’t have followed through because like it’s way harder than he thought it’d be. But then he gets assassinated so everyone else just actually follows through (I’ll cover this more down below).
5. It was tremendously difficult. For every hour of space flight during Apollo, people spent one million hours on the ground to make that happen. Woof.
6. The author also puts the technical Apollo project into perspective relative to trickier problems of poverty, education, civil rights, etc. that were being tackled at the same time. I wouldn’t call this a strength of the book, it feels a bit stretched, but I think it’s nice he took a shot at trying to distill some salient differences between the two types of problems.
7. That said, the book is basically about what human beings can accomplish when they unite behind a common purpose with dedicated resources. And that point about the common purpose seems to be the main factor. This should not have been possible in the time it was done and the thing that made it possible was that a lot of people tried to do the same thing because they felt it was right and important and even if they couldn’t they should try. I wonder what else we could be doing that with.
8. The biggest long-term impact really had nothing to do with space or any of the seven points above. It was that the program massively funded and perfected digital computing which then reshaped the terrestrial world. At one point, NASA was buying more than 95% of all integrated circuits and was subjecting those circuits to quality standards unlike anything that had ever existed before. Moore from Moore’s law? He was working on integrated circuits for NASA when he decided that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every 18 months. And he was working like hell at it.
Two other comments – one on detail the book does extremely well and the other on the author’s “Kennedy would have quit” speculation.
Toward the end of the book, the author explores some aspects of landing on the moon that are hard but might not seem hard – he puts a big exclamation point on just what a comically difficult thing this was to do. We get a full chapter on rendezvous in space and orbital mechanics and one on the lunar module, which by default could never be tested prior to use. These are really helpful reminders of just how technically challenging this was. Even something seemingly simple like “fly the ship to dock with the other ship” required a decade of math and left trained fighter pilots literally giving up after spending all their fuel and winding up farther from their target than they started. Human intuition does not work when you’re in space, but you can’t just turn it off. It’s fascinating to sit there and try to think about how ridiculous it is anyone ever thought they could solve all these problems.
The chapter on Kennedy strikes me as potential contentious, but I think it’s exactly the sort of thing a book length treatment can and should do do and the authors close textual analysis is thin but convincing, particularly when taking into account Kennedy’s broader personality. The author argues Kennedy launches headlong into the space race to the moon as only he could, but about a year later started to realize and dislike the political consequences of spending that amount of money every year for an event that wouldn’t even occur in his second term, if he won a second term. As a result, the author argues Kennedy started to change his mind. Slowly he was building an off-ramp that would have resulted in not going to the moon but declaring victory before that. The author presents a Kennedy who did not carefully assess the situation, but instead confidently plunged headlong into a battle that a mere year later he didn’t want to fight.
The startling conclusion - absent Kennedy’s assassination, maybe we aren’t on the moon in 1969. Maybe we still aren’t. One value of history is to reflect on how contingent many things actually are - how the inevitable and obvious in retrospect depends on a series of improbably events that could have gone quite differently. This is a speculative chapter – maybe speculative beyond the preferences of some readers. But I think it’s exactly the sort of stance an author like this has to take to fully allow his readers to interpret the history he has tried to present.
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