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).
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