Agent Palmer

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.

Around the time that the film adaptation of Lost Moon, called Apollo 13 came out, my parents who knew I was in love with all things NASA bought me the book by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.

The book, in a concerted marketing effort with the movie was also retitled from Lost Moon to Apollo 13 and with a picture of not Lovell but Tom Hanks as Lovell on the front cover. And while I read the book, or read through it when I picked it up recently, I now had the knowledge of the other books I’ve been reading.

There is much more to Gene Kranz than Ed Harris’s portrayal of the Flight Director in the movie Apollo 13. As one of the early members of Flight Control, Kranz was there for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo before moving up into more of a management role.

His book “Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond” is not only a vivid first-hand account of history as it happened, but the perspective is unique to mission control…

I’ve always been enamored by the Space Program. I remember putting on a football helmet, backpack covered in tin foil, recreating Armstrong’s first steps on the moon for something, though I have no idea what and that was when I was 8 or 9?

I remember watching The Right Stuff and, what is quite possibly the best miniseries on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo era of NASA Moonshot which was co-written by Deke Slayton and Al Shepherd.

There is something unique about Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer. Is it that it’s immensely rich with poetry in prose telling one of the great triumphs of modern engineering? Is it that Mailer looks for the lurking evil of the Moon or that he’s not sure if the moon shot itself was the work of the devil?

Could it be the dark humour, the deciphering of the three men who undertook the journey and those organizations and people who helped get them there? Or the curious platitudes on science versus engineering?