Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

Together these three men would midwife rocketry’s dubious, dazzling transformation from a hand-built, Kitty Hawk-esque world of wire and sheet metal into one of the main fronts of the cold war and the beginnings of the military-industrial complex. It’s here that Nelson’s narrative and analytic skills are most effectively put to use weaving the political and cultural history of the cold war together with the more ancient strands of science and wonder that attend it.

With Apollo’s context firmly in place, Nelson returns to Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins en route to the moon. His account of the mission relies heavily on long quotes, and in places the sequence of events seems scrambled. The story of the first moon landing has been told many times in film and books, but the tale is as staggering as ever: the distances crossed, the dangers averted, the fuel burned, the dollars spent.

The temperaments of the astronauts, too, are familiar from previous accounts. Collins is workmanlike and modest, seemingly content to tenant the orbiting command module while his colleagues walk on the moon. Aldrin, whose edgy wit marked him as Apollo’s hepcat, never quite masters his ambition to be the first man to climb down the ladder. Armstrong, bland and omnicompetent, is as enigmatic as the man in the moon.

But their experiences in space remain striking, and Nelson conveys the worries, wonder, and sheer delight they felt when they landed on the moon. And if there are occasional missteps and flat notes, there are freshly observed passages as well – as when Nelson compares the Lunar Module to a bacteriophage virus: “[I[t was, after all, a machine engineered to attach itself to a foreign body and release its alien DNA – Armstrong and Aldrin.”

Nelson manages a formidable task here, tackling not only the complex story of Apollo, but the massive literature spawned by the space race. Andrew Smith’s quirky, moving “Moondust” plumbs the astronautic psyche; David Mindell’s lucid, eye-opening “Digital Apollo” examines the technological story of the moon landings; Robert Poole’s ruminative, wide-ranging “Earthrise” charts the symbolic meanings of these voyages at the edge of interplanetary space.

“Rocket Men” strives to touch what these more focused books have done; in the end, it reaches its goal fitfully, through massive expenditures of time and energy. In this way, it’s reminiscent of Apollo itself.

Matthew Battles is a writer in Jamaica Plain, Mass. Born during the Apollo 8 mission, he has always been fascinated with the moon.

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