The Moonlandings: An Eyewitness Account

Were the Apollo moonlandings an epic of scientific exploration, a safety valve for cold war rivalries or a boondoggle subsidy to the aerospace industry? They were all of these things, according to this idiosyncratic history cum memoir. Longtime BBC aerospace reporter Turnill gives a comprehensive overview of the Apollo program, including its origins in America's post-Sputnik panic, the preliminary Mercury and Gemini programs, the drama of the Apollo 11 landing and the Apollo 13 near-disaster, as well as the program's demise amid waning public interest, rising costs and a general sense that the moonlaunches had accomplished all they could accomplish. Turnill's eyewitness account focuses less on the landings than it does on the news coverage of the landings. On the one hand, this results in some tedious passages devoted to wranglings with his editors and the minutiae of trying to establish telecom links to file his stories, while others are taken up reprinting raw transcripts of impenetrably jargon-filled back-and-forth between Houston and the astronauts, as if there were air-time to kill. On the other hand, Turnill's eye for human interest, flair for punchy narrative and superb expositions of the science and technology of space exploration, honed by decades of reporting for popular audiences, make for an engaging read. Free for the most part of right-stuff mythologizing, and canny about the effects of personal antagonisms, budgetary constraints and political opportunism on the space program, this is a clear-eyed account that still conveys the real excitement and achievement of the race for the moon.