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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
The space race is the defining technological revolution of the middle of the 20th century with its high costs, incorporation of new technologies like nylon, microchips and rope core memory computing and worldwide political implications. However, the drivers of the technology, both the people and the societal and technological trends, are still not widely known when the public looks back on the Apollo misdions. In One Giant Leap, Charles Fishman seeks to dig deep into what were the motivations behind certain decisions like the orbital flight paths and three staged spaceships.
Fishman does this thru a part analogical approach, part chronological by starting with how absurd it seemed to declare to go to the moon when no one had the slightest idea of the best idea to get there, let alone build a way and also delves into the initial fear of Soviet claims to scientific superiority with their launches of Sputnik 1 and 2 and Yuri Gagarin. He then jumps around to different power players from JFK to Bill Tindall, the NASA official in charge of the Apollo software, and how their opinions were fluid and sometimes at odds with the mission goals. Of particular interest to me was the project management organization that went into the building of the spaceship as hundreds of companies supplied parts sith several large civilian contractors heading the main designs based on their expertise. It truly was a nation wide effort. Even the symbolism behind the exploration required teamwork as the flag planted on the moon for apollo 11 was a late addition to the flight and needed approval.
All in all, Fishman does his research whether that’s with the advance in computing power thru the mass purchase of microchips by MIT and NASA and the secret tapes JFK recorded where he flopped on the moon landing needing to be a top priority of his presidency if it couldn’t be done while he was president or could be done with Soviet support. He even includes a hundred pages of citations to support his figures. In all, his writing is crisp even if the subjects at first seem slightly scattered before they coalesce in importance. In a way, One Giant Leap matches the essence of the space race and the final chapter’s head quote by JFK “No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning of the mastery of space will be” and yet we are still learning and exploring in space 50 plus years after the last time we put a man on the moon.
Fishman does this thru a part analogical approach, part chronological by starting with how absurd it seemed to declare to go to the moon when no one had the slightest idea of the best idea to get there, let alone build a way and also delves into the initial fear of Soviet claims to scientific superiority with their launches of Sputnik 1 and 2 and Yuri Gagarin. He then jumps around to different power players from JFK to Bill Tindall, the NASA official in charge of the Apollo software, and how their opinions were fluid and sometimes at odds with the mission goals. Of particular interest to me was the project management organization that went into the building of the spaceship as hundreds of companies supplied parts sith several large civilian contractors heading the main designs based on their expertise. It truly was a nation wide effort. Even the symbolism behind the exploration required teamwork as the flag planted on the moon for apollo 11 was a late addition to the flight and needed approval.
All in all, Fishman does his research whether that’s with the advance in computing power thru the mass purchase of microchips by MIT and NASA and the secret tapes JFK recorded where he flopped on the moon landing needing to be a top priority of his presidency if it couldn’t be done while he was president or could be done with Soviet support. He even includes a hundred pages of citations to support his figures. In all, his writing is crisp even if the subjects at first seem slightly scattered before they coalesce in importance. In a way, One Giant Leap matches the essence of the space race and the final chapter’s head quote by JFK “No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning of the mastery of space will be” and yet we are still learning and exploring in space 50 plus years after the last time we put a man on the moon.
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Fascinating! Incredibly well-researched and written in a way that's intriguing, not dry.
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
I really liked this. While it's probably a bit too technical for some, I enjoyed the nitty gritty details of what went into our flight to the moon 50 years ago. It truly is remarkable that our nation was able to do it despite not knowing how at the start of the sixties (and with a computer that had less memory than modern kitchen appliances. And so much of our current digital age can be attributed to the Apollo missions and the technology we developed and perfected to get to the moon. Cool to think about.
I loved reading this book! The explanation of the science and will to succeed that led to the moon landings is enhanced by the context of history, before, during and after the Apollo years. I was almost 10 years old at the time of Apollo 11 and I remember staying up late to watch the landing on TV. This book illuminates many things I was too young to understand at the time and makes a great argument for regarding the Apollo mission as an amazing success. Highly recommended.
informative
slow-paced
Overall, this was a fascinating look into America’s emergence into the space age. I appreciated the holistic approach this book took, by not only providing a thorough overview of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, but also enumerating the many steps it took to get there (starting from the historical, political and technological context and the programs proceeding it) as well as how the program affected technology and American culture.
One negative aspect of this book is that at times, the author would string together a long series of statistics without much intervening explanation or context. While this information was often interesting overall, it did start to get overwhelming. There were also several instances where the content started getting repetitive. In addition, the author often jumped around the chronology to explore a theme rather than the next step in history. While overall this added a dynamic and in depth sense to the book, at other times it felt haphazard or uncoordinated.
Despite these downsides, One Giant Leap offers a unique approach to presenting the Apollo space program, and is definitely worth the read.
——
Three times as many people worked on Apollo was on the Manhattan project
In 1966, five years after JFK formally announce the project, Nas I was spending $1 million every three hours 24 hours a day on the Apollo project. By comparison, they only spent $1 million total in 1961.
There was surprisingly little public support for the moon landing. In 1960 for a pole show that only 26% of Americans thought we should go all out to make the Russians to the moon.
Apollo eight orbited the moon in 1968, making America the first country to reach the Moon
Four weeks after Apollo eight mission, a Paul show that only 39% of Americans favored up moon landing. 55% of Americans said they didn’t think the space program was worth a $4 billion a year it cost it
The space shuttle program shut down in 2011; and 2018 in order for American astronauts to go to space we have to pay for tickets on a Russian shuttle which is only slightly improved be on the technological capabilities of the shuttles that went up in like the 1960s.
94% of US households watched the Apollo moon landing on TV. However, the interest quickly deteriorated as if you were people watched the Apollo 17 mission, the last Apollo mission and watch that weeks episode of all in the family.
The Apollo computer fit into one cubic foot of space and did it calculations practically instantaneously; this was an astonishing feet of engineering because at the beginning of that decade, computers took up entire rooms and took hours for days to do their calculations.
The Russians were the first ones to send a satellite into orbit around the earth, have a satellite reach the moon, have an unmanned craft land on the moon and place a flag, send a satellite to take pictures of the Darkside of the moon, launch animals into space and bring them back safely, and launch a man to orbit. This all happened before JFK was elected president, most of it happening in the late 1950s with the dogs and the astronaut occurring in 1960
Every pound of supplies on the lunar module required 3lbs of fuel at takeoff, which is why they didn’t give the Eagle lunar module lots of extra fuel
The navigation and guidance computer for the lunar module was able to instantly do the difficult calculations to navigate space, but had less computing power than most microwave ovens today
The MIT engineers who created the real time computing module for the lunar landing module had to do so using a computer that did its calculations from punchcards that took hours or days to calculate
Apollo 11 was the first time that human lives were placed in the hands of a computer
The Apollo computer had 73 kB of memory which is less than the average email size today. The computer had two millions of 1% of the computing capacity of an iPhone XS
In space, if you’re going to the moon and your course is off by 0.5°, then you end up 2100 miles out space, off by the distance of the diameter of the moon.
It takes about 65 hours to fly back from the moon to earth. When you’re getting close to re-entering the atmosphere, you’re going 7 mi./s and the reentry zone is only 40 miles wide, so there’s absolutely no room for error.
When NASA selected the company that would be building the lunar module, the company asked MIT how big the computer would be. At that point am I T had no idea how big the computer with me so they just guessed it would be about a cubic foot; keep in mind that at this time most computers were the size of an entire room. Once it was complete, the computer and it up being just over one cubic foot. When MIT made the one cubic foot guesstimate, the materials for the computer filled four refrigerator sized racks.
When NASA was designing a probe to go to Venus, they had one error in the handwritten calculations that were put on a punchcard for the ground computer that ended up making the rocket not able to calculate its course and aborted mission. Hey single bar going to the-was missing over in a bar that would’ve change the equation, A mistake that cost $18.5 million. It was the mariner one probe.
Every hour of Apollo space flight required 1 million hours of work on the ground
There were 589,824 wires in the Apollo 11 computer, each one related to either a 1 (threaded through a ring magnet) or a 0 (next to the magnet). Each was threaded by hand. Because of the time-consuming nature of this software coding, the software had to be complete 8-12 weeks before launch and no changes could be made.
During the 1960s in the lead up to the Apollo program, Nassau went from the government agency with the 10th largest budget to the one with the third largest budget
In a secretly taped meeting with the heads of NASA, Kennedy admitted that he wasn’t really interested in space exploration/travel, he just wanted to beat the Russians to the moon
There was a loss of support and funding in the months leading up to Kennedy‘s assassination because people didn’t see the reason why so much money should be in funneled towards the lunar program to try and force a man landing on the moon by 1970 because it really didn’t seem like we needed to be in such a rush to beat the Russians anymore. However, Lyndon B Johnson was an authentic believer in the space program and reignited the vigor for getting a man to the moon by 1970 and requested the necessary funds to do self following Kennedy‘s assassination. “There is no second class ticket to space.”
The exit strategy from the lunar module was almost a rope with knots on it that the astronauts would have to clamber up and down to get in and out of the module. It ended up being a ladder in the end because there were too many potential issues with the rope (what if one astronaut was injured and couldn’t haul themselves up? What if they were too tried for the extremely strenuous task of hauling themselves up while wearing a bulky spacesuit? What if they fell? Etc.)
The idea of doing a lunar rendezvous which involves taking just the lunar module down to the moon and having a rendezvous back up with the main spaceship was text initially look down on us too difficult or impossible because of how difficult and unknown space style rendezvous‘s are because of gravitational mechanics. However that ended up being the method they went with because it allowed the shuttle that landed on the moon to have to carry significantly less weight and therefore less fuel, and it’s also easier to land the module than an entire space shuttle.
The company that made the lunar modules was a fighter jet making company in World War II; during World War II they made 14 warplanes a day; and contrast it took them 10 years to make 14 lunar modules.
Apollo didn’t usher in the space age, but it did usher in the digital age. We would have eventually made the technological leaps that were made because of the Apollo missions, but they gave America and excitement about technology and probably help speed up the process but it would’ve otherwise gone.
From start to finish, Apollo cost $19.4 billion; in 2019, dollars, that’s equivalent to $125.4 billion
Just because time, money and resources went into the winter project, doesn’t mean that it was necessarily taking away from other items; for example, it’s not like money was taken away from the defense or education budget to fund the winter program. Even if the winter program hadn’t happened the money that has been allocated to it would not have ended up going to cancer research or education or what have you because it wasn’t earmarked for that and they weren’t even in the same category.
One negative aspect of this book is that at times, the author would string together a long series of statistics without much intervening explanation or context. While this information was often interesting overall, it did start to get overwhelming. There were also several instances where the content started getting repetitive. In addition, the author often jumped around the chronology to explore a theme rather than the next step in history. While overall this added a dynamic and in depth sense to the book, at other times it felt haphazard or uncoordinated.
Despite these downsides, One Giant Leap offers a unique approach to presenting the Apollo space program, and is definitely worth the read.
——
Three times as many people worked on Apollo was on the Manhattan project
In 1966, five years after JFK formally announce the project, Nas I was spending $1 million every three hours 24 hours a day on the Apollo project. By comparison, they only spent $1 million total in 1961.
There was surprisingly little public support for the moon landing. In 1960 for a pole show that only 26% of Americans thought we should go all out to make the Russians to the moon.
Apollo eight orbited the moon in 1968, making America the first country to reach the Moon
Four weeks after Apollo eight mission, a Paul show that only 39% of Americans favored up moon landing. 55% of Americans said they didn’t think the space program was worth a $4 billion a year it cost it
The space shuttle program shut down in 2011; and 2018 in order for American astronauts to go to space we have to pay for tickets on a Russian shuttle which is only slightly improved be on the technological capabilities of the shuttles that went up in like the 1960s.
94% of US households watched the Apollo moon landing on TV. However, the interest quickly deteriorated as if you were people watched the Apollo 17 mission, the last Apollo mission and watch that weeks episode of all in the family.
The Apollo computer fit into one cubic foot of space and did it calculations practically instantaneously; this was an astonishing feet of engineering because at the beginning of that decade, computers took up entire rooms and took hours for days to do their calculations.
The Russians were the first ones to send a satellite into orbit around the earth, have a satellite reach the moon, have an unmanned craft land on the moon and place a flag, send a satellite to take pictures of the Darkside of the moon, launch animals into space and bring them back safely, and launch a man to orbit. This all happened before JFK was elected president, most of it happening in the late 1950s with the dogs and the astronaut occurring in 1960
Every pound of supplies on the lunar module required 3lbs of fuel at takeoff, which is why they didn’t give the Eagle lunar module lots of extra fuel
The navigation and guidance computer for the lunar module was able to instantly do the difficult calculations to navigate space, but had less computing power than most microwave ovens today
The MIT engineers who created the real time computing module for the lunar landing module had to do so using a computer that did its calculations from punchcards that took hours or days to calculate
Apollo 11 was the first time that human lives were placed in the hands of a computer
The Apollo computer had 73 kB of memory which is less than the average email size today. The computer had two millions of 1% of the computing capacity of an iPhone XS
In space, if you’re going to the moon and your course is off by 0.5°, then you end up 2100 miles out space, off by the distance of the diameter of the moon.
It takes about 65 hours to fly back from the moon to earth. When you’re getting close to re-entering the atmosphere, you’re going 7 mi./s and the reentry zone is only 40 miles wide, so there’s absolutely no room for error.
When NASA selected the company that would be building the lunar module, the company asked MIT how big the computer would be. At that point am I T had no idea how big the computer with me so they just guessed it would be about a cubic foot; keep in mind that at this time most computers were the size of an entire room. Once it was complete, the computer and it up being just over one cubic foot. When MIT made the one cubic foot guesstimate, the materials for the computer filled four refrigerator sized racks.
When NASA was designing a probe to go to Venus, they had one error in the handwritten calculations that were put on a punchcard for the ground computer that ended up making the rocket not able to calculate its course and aborted mission. Hey single bar going to the-was missing over in a bar that would’ve change the equation, A mistake that cost $18.5 million. It was the mariner one probe.
Every hour of Apollo space flight required 1 million hours of work on the ground
There were 589,824 wires in the Apollo 11 computer, each one related to either a 1 (threaded through a ring magnet) or a 0 (next to the magnet). Each was threaded by hand. Because of the time-consuming nature of this software coding, the software had to be complete 8-12 weeks before launch and no changes could be made.
During the 1960s in the lead up to the Apollo program, Nassau went from the government agency with the 10th largest budget to the one with the third largest budget
In a secretly taped meeting with the heads of NASA, Kennedy admitted that he wasn’t really interested in space exploration/travel, he just wanted to beat the Russians to the moon
There was a loss of support and funding in the months leading up to Kennedy‘s assassination because people didn’t see the reason why so much money should be in funneled towards the lunar program to try and force a man landing on the moon by 1970 because it really didn’t seem like we needed to be in such a rush to beat the Russians anymore. However, Lyndon B Johnson was an authentic believer in the space program and reignited the vigor for getting a man to the moon by 1970 and requested the necessary funds to do self following Kennedy‘s assassination. “There is no second class ticket to space.”
The exit strategy from the lunar module was almost a rope with knots on it that the astronauts would have to clamber up and down to get in and out of the module. It ended up being a ladder in the end because there were too many potential issues with the rope (what if one astronaut was injured and couldn’t haul themselves up? What if they were too tried for the extremely strenuous task of hauling themselves up while wearing a bulky spacesuit? What if they fell? Etc.)
The idea of doing a lunar rendezvous which involves taking just the lunar module down to the moon and having a rendezvous back up with the main spaceship was text initially look down on us too difficult or impossible because of how difficult and unknown space style rendezvous‘s are because of gravitational mechanics. However that ended up being the method they went with because it allowed the shuttle that landed on the moon to have to carry significantly less weight and therefore less fuel, and it’s also easier to land the module than an entire space shuttle.
The company that made the lunar modules was a fighter jet making company in World War II; during World War II they made 14 warplanes a day; and contrast it took them 10 years to make 14 lunar modules.
Apollo didn’t usher in the space age, but it did usher in the digital age. We would have eventually made the technological leaps that were made because of the Apollo missions, but they gave America and excitement about technology and probably help speed up the process but it would’ve otherwise gone.
From start to finish, Apollo cost $19.4 billion; in 2019, dollars, that’s equivalent to $125.4 billion
Just because time, money and resources went into the winter project, doesn’t mean that it was necessarily taking away from other items; for example, it’s not like money was taken away from the defense or education budget to fund the winter program. Even if the winter program hadn’t happened the money that has been allocated to it would not have ended up going to cancer research or education or what have you because it wasn’t earmarked for that and they weren’t even in the same category.
Okay, in all fairness, this book was well researched. However, I never felt like I had the nostalgia to care about the events or to accept his conclusions about the American spirit.
hopeful
informative
medium-paced