Story: Long before men set foot on the moon or even set off on a journey to orbit it, NASA engineers and their brethren at several corporate contractors and subcontractors sweated blood to make sure that the astronauts would have spaceworthy vehicles to fly. Veteran aviation and theoretical engineers alike gave up family life, personal time, and other amenities because they faced the reality that, if their numbers were even slightly off, astronauts could die. Some of them watched their worst nightmares realized when Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died on the ground in the Apollo 1 fire. But they still kept up an unrelenting quest to get the numbers right and put Americans on the moon by the end of the sixties.
Review: A bit of a “tech novel” of sorts, Chariots For Apollo does not assume that anyone opening the book’s cover understands all of the terminology involved in going to the moon, let alone the math, but it does an admirable job of catching you up very quickly.
But that’s not the heart of this book.
Behind the tech talk, Chariots For Apollo is about the people who dreamed, and then built, the Apollo program (primarily the delicate lunar excursion module). Their hopes and their fears are on display in this book, including all of their worst-case scenario brainstorming (of the same kind that has more recently come to light in the wake of space shuttle Columbia’s demise in the sky over Texas) – the dark, secret province of engineers who have to dream dark so they know precisely what they want their creations to prevent. Though few books on the Apollo years have ever painted the moon program as anything less than a risky endeavor, “Chariots For Apollo” gave me a stark and humbling realization of the potential outcomes of those risks. That nothing went more wrong than Apollo 13, and that that mission’s crew returned intact, seems more and more like a miracle.
Also humbling and disturbing is the portion of the book devoted to the aftermath of Apollo 1. Suicidal thoughts and even actual suicides plagued those engineers who felt somehow responsible for that mission (including one man who drove his car – with his wife and children inside – into the path of a train following the death of the three Apollo 1 astronauts). Dreamers they may have been, the Apollo designers and builders knew what could happen if they cut corners or got careless.
To a minor degree, since it provided so much of a motivational force for the U.S. space program, the Soviets’ activities are covered, including a declassified transcription/translation of the Soyuz 1 flight, which ended in tragedy when its landing parachutes were shredded by a rough re-entry, and the return capsule’s sole occupant was killed when Soyuz 1 returned to Russian soil at over 400 miles per hour. Though the Soviet space program isn’t a huge part of this book, it’s ever-present in the background, and occasionally takes center stage with some fascinating material I’ve never seen before, including diagrams of the Soviet lunar craft that could have competed with Apollo. Had it not been for the Soyuz 1 disaster and the subsequent reworking of spacecraft designs and safety procedures, the race to the moon could have been much closer.
“Chariots For Apollo” won’t just appeal to the engineering minds out there, but it will inspire them. But despite all of its talk of machines, trajectories, fuel and physics, “Chariots For Apollo” also holds a surprising amount of human drama, and that is the heart of this book.
Year: 1999
Authors: Charles R. Pellegrino, Joshua Stoff
Publisher: Avon
Pages: 320 pages