What a superb history. After finishing it, I found that it did several things that I liked. First of all, it stayed true to its title and concentrates tightly on the Apollo Program only, tracing its journey from the creation of NASA in the late-50s post-Sputnik panic to the splashdown of Apollo 17. Secondly, it focused on the engineers who designed and guided the Apollo rather than either the astronauts who flew it or the politicians who oversaw it - this was a side of the story I'd never heard about before and ended up being fascinated by. Thirdly, it was told mainly through interviews, which both gave it an extremely strong and skillfully-conveyed narrative, and grounded it concretely in actual facts and events, making it much more powerful than a book told only through archival research or secondary sources.

What I took away from it is a strong sense of heroism, which is a much-abused word, but seems like the only appropriate one for the group of men who where given an impossible job and ended up doing it almost perfectly in a dizzyingly short amount of time. A mere decade after the creation of NASA, the US space program went from a collection of exploding rockets and second-place finishes to placing human beings on the moon, something that even to a hardened science fiction fan like me still doesn't quite seem real and gets only more incredible after reading the litany of technical challenges that had to be overcome to do it. As The Onion memorably put it, "Holy Shit, Man Lands On Fucking Moon" - these guys did that!

However, just as interested as I was by the technical difficulties - engines larger than any before, guidance systems more precise, mechanical systems more complex - I was also captivated by the way that the men themselves talked about the organizations they worked for and how they were run, the ways in which their managers channeled and refined their energies into this superhuman endeavor. In a sense, the only real secret to building a good organization, be it a large corporation, a public agency, or a small team, is recruiting the right people and then managing them appropriately. This trick is so difficult than an entire sub-sector of the publishing industry is devoted to it, but check out the advice Charles Murray gave in an interview on the 20th anniversary of the book's publishing to someone who wanted to duplicate the feats of the Apollo Program: "Disband NASA. Bulldoze all the centers. Identify a couple of hundred guys at Marshall who are obsessed with rockets and keep them. Choose forty-five people from Langley and Lewis - half of them space nuts, and half of them people whose supervisors want to get rid of them. Give them a mission and a lot of money and stand back."

To see the paradoxical combination of freewheeling engineering creativity and serious detail-oriented procedural adherence is very illuminating, and I'm sure this era of NASA will be a staple of business books for decades to come, both in its allowance for creativity and initiative and in its ability to deal with crises like the Apollo 1 fire or the explosion in Apollo 13's oxygen tank. Maybe it's simply impossible for that combination of attributes to be sustained forever, in the same way that every society or company or group of people seems to have a golden age that lasts for a brief time and then can never be recaptured. Certainly the era of moribund bureaucracy that NASA is currently trapped in seems like a cruel parody of the time period in this book, where people set about turning fantasy into reality with a sense of purpose, determination, and even joy. In that same interview, Murray has another thought-provoking, fairly pessimistic comment about the limits of efforts to replicate projects like this: "Apollo, like the Manhattan Project, proved that humans are capable of extraordinary feats in unbelievably short periods of time, but only if five conditions are met: The people doing the work have to have a concrete goal. They must have a sense of urgency - because of a specific calendar deadline in the case of Apollo, or beating the Germans in the case of the Manhattan Project. The concrete goal has to be technological, not social (we just don't know how to change human behavior on a large scale). The people paying for the work must be willing to spend lavishly. And, most importantly, the people paying for the work must get the hell out of the way of the people doing the work."

I'm not certain that he's completely right about the social aspect of the goal (despite their slow pace and often high costs, initiatives like anti-racism, the war on poverty, increased access to health care, gay rights, or feminism have achieved astonishing things in what seems like a very short time in world-historical terms), but it's worth pondering that bit about standing back and letting engineers design their dreams without interference from the world around them, even as everyone acknowledges the many fruits of the space race. Is that the way we want to run our big national priorities, the moon projects of the future (even Kennedy had to be convinced that space was really a priority, and Johnson was all along the bigger visionary)? Well, as Joe Shea, one of the most important managers in the program recalls, the question is "You really want to go there?" Sometimes you have to trust in people, and trust in the project you've set for them. The cost-effectiveness of going to the moon has always been under debate, and the story told here won't necessarily change your opinion either way, but if you want to know how it was done and who did it, you can't find a better history. ( )

Thorough background on the actions of mission control during the Apollo program. Easy read and interesting. ( )

If I'd made the connection with Murray's political reputation as "right-wing spawn of the Devil" I would probably never have picked this book up - I didn't realise that he was the Bell curve man until I'd finished reading it. Which perhaps just goes to show that we ought to be prepared to put our prejudices aside from time to time, since this book doesn't seem to have any very explicit political axe to grind at all.

Cox and Murray seem to have become interested in the history of the US manned space programme (which is well outside both their fields of study) largely by accident, and they approach it in the best tradition of American narrative non-fiction, the way books used to be written before everything had to be structured like a TV documentary. Their interest is focussed on the people who took up Kennedy's challenge and made it happen, in particular the engineers who built the launch vehicles and spacecraft, the flight operations people who made sure they completed their missions and got the crews back, and the NASA bosses who created the management structures that allowed such a colossal project to function at all. They obviously spent a lot of time talking to the people involved in Apollo, and they tell their story in a lively, fluent way. There's less about the actual engineering than I would have liked, but enough to allow readers to make sense of the story most of the time. And their account of the dynamics of the teams of scientists and engineers and the way they worked under pressure rings very true.

The book reminds us about the general questions that were raised (mostly afterwards - although they do argue that Kennedy was initially sceptical himself) about the utility and value-for-money of manned spaceflight, but it doesn't attempt to analyse these in detail: Apollo is presented, reasonably enough, as an outstanding human and technical achievement, and the interest is more in how it was done rather than why. Writing in the late 1980s, the authors obviously didn't have access to Soviet records, and they don't go into the question of whether there ever really was anyone else in the "race" to the Moon.

As always when I think about the Apollo programme, I'm astounded how they managed to do it all in feet and inches, with essentially no women engineers in the team at all, and with computers that had a fraction of the processing power of the modern washing-machine. It must all have been down to the pens in their shirt-pockets... ( )

Account of the Apollo program. Definitely captures the mood, spirit, and wild-ride that the Apollo and the space-race was. You won't be able to put it down. ( )

A band of unknown guys accomplishes the impossible
This story will pull you in and make you feel part of the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. ( )