Book - Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon

By Jeffrey Kluger. Hardback, 2017. 307 pages, including 15 pages of photos, some in color. This copy is in excellent used condition, no flaws. This is an achievement that will never cease to fascinate me. At its peak, the Apollo program not only employed 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 contractors but it coordinated all of these people's contributions to successfully reach a bananas goal. Because Russia was winning the space race, Apollo 8 was decided on and put together in 1968 in just 16 weeks. SIXTEEN WEEKS. It truly boggles the mind. Like, it's taken me DECADES to get my own shit together, and I don't even have to engineer anything in my life to withstand the vacuum of space! Anyway, this was the mission from which we got the famous photo Earthrise. Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth's gravitational sphere of influence, and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon and orbit it before returning to Earth. Brilliant technical achievement by courageous people who had no idea whether it would work or whether they'd live to tell the tale. Not just a thrilling story as far as narratives go, but deeply inspirational as an accomplishment of civilization. My husband got me hooked on this stuff and now we watch our favorite space-mission documentaries every couple of years. They never get old! 🚀 🍌