Agent Palmer

Donald K. “Deke” Slayton may not be the household name he should be, but he has had a hand in shaping history as we have come to know it. He was one of the original Mercury Seven, unfortunately, he was the one who didn’t get a flight, but he did eventually make it into space, and in the meantime, he ran the Astronaut Office, and the story for how he got there, his impressions, his knowledge, perspective, and his stories, are second to none.

All of this is what makes Deke! worth your time.

Amy Shira Teitel’s Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight features two characters who, while separated by 25 years in age, both lead the way for Sally Ride, but it wasn’t a smooth flight.

It’s compelling in the most dramatic of ways, and not just because the space program NASA had at the start consisted of “a bunch of rockets with a tendency to explode.” And despite a rallying cry of wanting the first woman in space to be American, it was Valentina Tereshkova from the Soviet Union who got there first.

When you read as much on the subject of early NASA even back to the Space Task Group, predecessor to NASA, there are a few names that always come up, and one of them is Chris Kraft.

He was basically the father of what would become Mission Control as we know it today, and in his autobiography Flight: My Life in Mission Control, the first NASA Flight Director, known simply as Flight, holds no punches.

It’s possible there exist plenty of places on the internet where you can read about the historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies in The Right Stuff. This is not really that place. I chose to overlook that and focus on one very important thing they got right. It is an inspiring story of the early tribulations of America’s space program, and to this day, it’s still an inspiring watch.

I have not yet read Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff on which the film was based, though it is making its way to the top of my list.

It has been three years since I last built my Lego Saturn V Rocket. And in that time I have read seven books about people who have worked around or taken a ride in a Saturn V.

Of those only a few were by men who had actually ridden in the rocket and even fewer had spent time in the Lunar Excursion Model, or LEM, or as LEGO calls it, the Lunar Lander.