MOON SHOT
Dan Parry
Ebury Press, $39.99, pbk
ONE GIANT LEAP
Piers Bizony
Aurum, $39.99, hbk
"Hurry - order your Man on the Moon collector's edition today" (Sky at Night magazine email). Yes, it's 40 years since it all happened, and the cold-mailing campaign is in full swing.
The prologue of Moon Shot (not to be confused with the 1994 book by astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton) makes a point pressed by broadcast commentators at the time of the earliest Mercury capsule missions, that the astronaut was genuinely in control and "flying" the capsule.
The difference was semantic, but the space race was on. And make no mistake, it was a race, technical and ideological, to the bitter end. Many expected the invisible winning post to be the 50th anniversary of the Revolution in 1967.
For a while, the American assumption was that they were way ahead. Neil Armstrong was himself a pilot of the X15 rocket plane that flew to the boundary of space. Unexpectedly, in October 1957, the Soviets shook the world rigid, announcing that Sputnik 1 was in orbit for all to verify. Then wham, a mere month later Sputnik 2 was launched with the live dog Laika aboard.
The next giant leap needed no spelling out. Just three and a-half years later, the Russian Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth. Mercifully for Nasa it had missed by minutes the intention to show to a Congressional committee a film of its own astounding progress, a sub-orbital trip by a chimpanzee.
Six weeks later President Kennedy made his famous commitment to landing a man on the Moon "and returning him safely to Earth", which was more than befell the luckless Laika.
Or a woman perhaps? Nasa's scandalised response to the notion of a man and woman in the same spacecraft makes hilarious reading (was there no consideration of sending all women, or perhaps a chaperone?).
Outline plans for a Moon landing had been developing for years before the Kennedy announcement, but the work to be done remained prodigious. Should they travel there and back in the colossal Nova rocket, glossing over the minor embarrassment that it didn't exist; or assemble a smaller spacecraft in Earth orbit?
The bright idea championed by John Houbolt, of a rendezvous in lunar orbit for the return journey, was roundly rubbished but was what they did in the end. Pioneering attempts to step out of a spacecraft into space came perilously close to claiming lives on both sides, but little was admitted at the time.
"Rendezvous" is easily said. Just take off from the Moon and join up with the Earth-bound spacecraft for the trip home. But as Jim McDivitt appreciated the first time it was tested in Earth orbit, the maths is quirky. Put your foot down to chase your quarry and you get further away!
How come? Increased speed simply lifts you into a higher, more elliptical and slower orbit at that point. The solution is counter-intuitive, but learnable. You need to duck down (gaining speed) then spring up to meet your target, but try doing that to centimetre accuracy. An understanding of rendezvous science helped to earn Buzz Aldrin his seat on the journey into history.
Subliminally, one can envisage Aldrin picking up the nickname "Buzz" somewhere along his career from jet pilot to moon landing. The prosaic reality was that soon after he was born, his two small sisters called him brother, except that the younger sister pronounced it buzzer, which stuck.
This is the level of selective detail that characterises Moon Shot. The style is almost academic with its profuse references, but the technical level of the information is less so.
Pathetic office politics and horse-trading went into the decision that Neil Armstrong should be first to set foot on the Moon. Conventionally, the number two (Buzz) should be first to venture outside the spacecraft. On the other hand Neil was commander and held the ace of being a neutral civilian.
Perhaps it's the mediator in me that says: why worry? They landed simultaneously on the Moon; did it then matter who fell out of the door first? Do we distinguish between Hillary and Tenzing? Michael Collins was equally essential to the expedition as he remained in orbit above the Moon, but was sadly overlooked in Richard Nixon's congratulatory broadcast.
One Giant Leap (not to be confused with the 2004 book by Leon Wagener) is closer to the coffee-table genre, for it is three-quarters pictures. They're good pictures, many full-page, extending into the history and infrastructure of the space effort and including photos of the voyage not commonly seen.
The fine details of the spacecraft sitting on the Moon, and of the astronauts setting up the experiments left behind, repay endless study.
The text is factual on the history of the Moon landing itself but ventures more widely into speculative portrayals of future space travel, again well illustrated. The two books, as an online store is fond of saying, might be "better together".
Now here's a party-stopping thought about the nature of success: can you name the second pair to land on the Moon (or to climb Everest?). Perhaps it's a moot point anyway, because of course the Moon landing never really happened: it was faked in a Hollywood studio and the Nevada desert, all six flights - you can tell by the lack of radio delay . . .
- Clive Trotman is a Dunedin science writer and technical arbitrator who met his wife Jeanette while she was predicting ionospheric reflectance and he was tracking satellites, for the British government.
