Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

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Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

Author: Craig Nelson
Publisher: Viking Adult
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 404
Cover Price: $ 27.95

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A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of the greatest achievements of humankind. At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon.

Rocket Men is the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vivid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission.

From the quotidian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right into the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control.Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history.

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Background Information

The Apollo program was designed to put an American on the moon, and was successful in that objective in 1969. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was established by Congress in 1958 to guide American research in space.