Book review: This lunar read will thrill space nerds of all ages
The lunar module, containing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, approaches the Apollo 11 command module for a rendezvous on July 21, 1969, with a half-Earth in the background. Picture: Getty
IT is nearly 50 years since people last walked on the surface of the moon – the moon! – in an age with no internet or smartphones, driven there in rattling tin cans at unimaginable speeds by huge controlled explosions. Boosters of the modern app economy love to claim that right now the pace of technological change is the fastest it has ever been, but they are somehow forgetting the period between 1957, when the USSR put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit, and 1969, when three men flew to the moon and two of them descended in a separate spacecraft, walked around collecting rocks, and then blasted off again, docking with the original spacecraft, before flying back to Earth and splashing down safely in the ocean.
The vehicle that had pushed them laboriously out of Earth’s gravity well was the Saturn V, still the largest rocket ever built, a 36-storey-high behemoth designed under the guidance of Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
