Agent Palmer

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon is a lovingly written history of America’s journey from the ground to the Moon. It’s written by two of the original Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton and two of the most respected aerospace journalists of the Apollo era Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict.

As an all-encompassing book of the golden-era of NASA – Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, plus what was happening in Russia, and at times in the halls of the U.S. Congress – this is as complete a telling of the race for the Moon as you will get in one single volume.

“On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock hit, Like a Rolling Stone. The audience of committed folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet reacted with a mix of shock, booing, and scattered cheers.

It was the shot heard round the world—Dylan’s declaration of musical independence, the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a generation—and one of the defining moments in twentieth-century music.”

While the Olympics have been a bit hit or miss for me, less of it has to do with the network and more of it has to do with time zones, I have caught some of it, and of course, the USA’s win in the Gold Cup has continued the summer of soccer, but sports is not the only thing I have been consuming this summer.

I have been watching and listening to other things as well, plus my regular podcast habit (with a few new ones I’ll be mentioning), and my reading, means that there is literally always something to consume.

There’s been a lot of talk about the naming conventions of a certain generation of late. I am one of those unfortunate souls stuck in between, particularly of the newly coined “geriatric millennials,” but it did come with some benefits. We were adaptable to the technological advances of our time, but we also got to experience the joy of the mundane as did our predecessors in Generation X.

Two of those things I came across while cleaning out some old boxes that highlight the mundane were Newfield Publications’ Sports Pages and Edito-Service Military Aviation Airplane Cards.

“NASA wasn’t created in a vacuum and suddenly tasked with the Moon landing,” writes Amy Shira Teitel in her debut publication Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA.

Without historians and authors, of which Teitel is both, it would appear as if NASA did just appear on the scene ready, able, and willing to start Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. But the truth is much more intriguing and far less polished than pop culture and general history would have you believe.