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As the 20th century ends and we approach the beginning of a new
millennium, future generations will look back and recall the
leaving of our home planet as a defining moment in the history of
humankind. The story of Apollo has been told and retold many times
by those fortunate enough to have experienced space travel
first-hand--the astronauts themselves. Those who managed to leave
the cradle of the Earth and walk upon the surface of the Moon offer
a unique perspective shared firsthand by only a handful of people
chosen to represent humankind in the culmination of this great
adventure. As we reflect on the 30th anniversary of Apollo's first
landing, we should not overlook other accounts of this monumental
achievement as offered by those representing the half a million
people associated with the program. During the 1960s, these people
joined in a national effort to bring to completion President John E
Kennedy's vision of landing Americans on the Moon and returning
them safely to Earth before the end of the decade. For a project as
massive as the Apollo program, history may distance itself to the
extent where modern interpretation distills a feeling that such
events took place without extensive human involvement. Nothing
could be further removed from the truth. Through the verbal
accounts offered by the oral histories such as presented in this
volume, we are reintroduced to the critical human factor which is
the essence of any history. People made Apollo happen and it is
important to preserve their thoughts, feelings, and recollections
for future generations. The oral histories presented in this volume
offer a sample of what NASA has done to preserve the story of
Apollo as part of our nation's human spaceflight heritage. The
accounts included in this book are a small sampling of the large
number of oral histories that have been conducted under the
auspices of the NASA history program, since near the beginning of
the Agency. They also represent the many personal contributions
made during Project Apollo, the single largest peacetime endeavor
in American history. These recollections span the origins,
management, and completion of that enormous effort and measurably
enhance our appreciation of its difficulty. Some of the key
individuals involved in Project Apollo are being preserved by NASA
and made available through this book.
July 1999 marks the 30th anniversary of the epochal lunar landing
of Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969. Although President John F.
Kennedy had made a public commitment on May 25, 1961, to land an
American on the Moon by the end of decade, up until that time
Apollo had been all promise.
This collection of oral histories of the Saturn/Apollo program
recounts the unique adventure of the lunar landing programme as
witnessed by some of the political leaders, engineers, scientists
and astronauts who made it such a success. It includes
recollections from James Webb, the NASA administrator whose
political connections to Washington extended back to the New Deal
of the 1930s; rocket pioneer and architect of the Saturn V rocket
Wernher von Braun; the resolute Robert Gilruth, director of the
Houston centre; the engineering iconoclast Maxime Faget, whose
designs of spacecraft made flights to the moon possible; and
astronauts such as Harrison Schmitt and Charles Duke.
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