We Reach the Moon Written by John Noble Wilford Analysis by Alissa Friedman MIT Class 16.895J, due April 2, 2007 According to the publisher, Bantam Books, We Reach the Moon responded to worldwide interest in the American moon missions, and was published fewer than three days after the splashdown of Apollo 11. It is one of the first books to capture the Apollo events and milestones, from the first space satellite to Kennedy’s reached goal. It begins with the launch of Sputnik and concludes with the “task accomplished” phrase on the mission control computer screens. The pages in-between are carefully laid out in chronological order of the Apollo program: from a scientific description of the moon, to the key players in assembling the NASA team and Apollo contractors, then highlighting the engineering systems necessary to drive misson success (such as G&N&C and the engineering of the command and lunar modules). It concludes with each mission leading up to and including the Apollo 11 manned landing. The author, John Noble Wilford, was (and still is) a newspaper reporter, so his book targeted the general public. He found ways to make the public understand the more complex technological or scientific topics that were important parts of the Apollo program. One way he did this was by using analogies to relate scientific topics to something not at all scientific. For example, in chapter two, he described the earth-moon combination and the celestial bodies’ relative revolution speeds by comparing the bodies to a pair of dancers, “think of the earth and the moon as a couple of dancers with arms locked, spinning wildly around a dance floor…the plane in which they spin is tipped slightly…and since the earth is 81 times more massive than its partner, it is the anchorman in the dance.”1 In chapter nine, he used this technique to relate the new moon-landing concept to early explorers exploring a new frontier. He also painted pictures of political events that shaped the 1960s to remind the public of what was occurring outside the Apollo project; Wilford prefaced chapter fourteen with the grim events of Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and students rioting around the world, events that he said “rocked the foundations of man’s institutions.”2 Wilford then used the Apollo 8 success as a means to uplift the spirit in the reader. “Not only did Apollo 8’s 1 John Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Books, 1969) 19 2 John Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Books, 1969) 184 1tremendous success inspire new confidence in the moon-landing project but it brought renewed hope to Americans and mankind in general. It seemed to make a profound spiritual impact on people.”3 Additionally, the author elaborated on many technical and political decisions that were made during the Apollo missions. Rather than providing the reader with only the decisions’ outcomes, he wrote about the many factors that came into play at the time of the decision. One example was the decision program director Samuel Phillips made regarding Apollo 10’s objective. Since Apollo 8 and 9 were great successes, there was thought of making Apollo 10 the manned lunar landing mission, despite the fact that the lunar lander was delayed in its preparedness for the mission. Phillips had to determine if Apollo 10 was technically ready to be the manned landing mission. Phillips had two choices: he could have delayed the next launch until the lander was ready and made Apollo 10 the manned lunar landing, or he could have made Apollo 10 the practice mission for Apollo 11, with the rather significant difference being a non-moon landing. Phillips thought this decision “fell in the class of choices where you can’t be wrong.”4 Phillips participated in “daily meetings, countless telephone conversations and visits to space centers and contractors’ plants” as well as “listening to the Apollo 9 crew’s debriefings and sounding out the flight controllers at Houston.”5 He chose the latter of his two options based upon the technical considerations of the lunar lander delay, and the lack of experience performing the mission in its ultimate environment (Apollo 8 orbited the moon but did not test a lunar lander, and Apollo 9 tested the lunar lander while in an earth orbit). Of course, his decision was not purely technical: NASA was on a deadline to both land a man on the moon before the decade’s end, and beat the Soviets in doing so. Apollo was under such public scrutiny that another failure (like Apollo 1) would have made the public doubt Apollo’s (and NASA’s) purpose, and NASA could have lost funding for future moon missions. Phillips’ decision portrayed the nature of engineering on a large-scale project like Apollo: because of the large, complex, never-been-done-before engineering systems, delays in commitment dates for these components caused the mission schedule to slip. NASA took great care in holding high engineering standards and even higher mission and human success rates, and this high demand 3 John Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Books, 1969) 205 4 John Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Books, 1969) 228 5 John Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Books, 1969) 228 2also had potential to postpone commitment dates. However, human safety was not to be sacrificed to meet a deadline or political pressures. Wilford called the Apollo missions “mankind’s greatest adventure.” As the leading aerospace reporter for The New York Times during the 1960s, he prefaced this book as a reporter’s book, as he did not call himself an engineer, scientist, or historian. He showed his fascination in the subject in his acknowledgements, “who could cover the story of man’s first footsteps on another world, and cover it as more than a science story of another nuts-and-bolts technology story, without feeling in himself a flutter of all the romantic urges that have sent man across oceans, up mountains and out into the air and then the space beyond the air? I could not.”6 His thoughts echoed in his writing, such as the chapter on Apollo 8 as mentioned above. Wilford also informed the public about the political, scientific, technical, and social aspects of the project, and he delivered. Because Wilford was a reporter for the Times, most of the evidence used was from Times articles, as well