Agent Palmer

Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon is the most complete story of Apollo 11 I have ever read. And that’s saying a lot considering how much I have read on the subject and how still engaged I am in learning as much as I can about NASA during its height of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

This book also covers the post-mortem of the program but let’s first see how this compares to the rest.

You know the movie, and perhaps you know the series. Both of those, however, were based upon the best-selling Tom Wolfe penned The Right Stuff. The book, as the movie and the series are, is based around the early beginnings of the space race, and it follows the exploits of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, test pilots, and the cultural issues surrounding the men and engineers tasked to get it done.

Wolfe paints the portraits of the Mercury program as a large landscape on which he can include a little editorial here and there as trees that dot the scope of the picture.

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.

Pete Conrad’s biography is not a cookie-cutter story. Then again, there was nothing cookie-cutter about him. He was, as his headstone implies, “An Original.” Co-written by his second wife Nancy Conrad and Howard A. Klausner, the writer of Space Cowboys, this biography is presented cinematically, but it would have been a thrilling ride anyway.

Honestly, if ever you needed proof that you can have fun and enjoy a serious job with a smile on your face, then Pete Conrad is exhibit A for astronauts.

In a nutshell, Dr. Space Junk vs The Universe by Alice Gorman tells the very non-linear origin story of Dr. Space Junk herself. Don’t let that narrative twist turn you away. It’s a tale filled not with missteps and mistakes but with the understanding that what you want now may not be what you want later. It’s also quite a philosophy and history book, too.

Let’s start with author Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist who is writing a book with the subtitle “Archaeology and the Future.”