Finished reading: Rocket Men by Robert Kurson
The success of Apollo 8 is one of the biggest achievements of American spaceflight, or possibly all human spaceflight. I love space stories, but I knew Apollo 11 and 13 far better than this one, so we listened to it on the way to Utah.
The story deserves a better author. This seems to be a theme with me recently: wishing that amazing stories had been told by better writers, or better editors maybe.
Kurson tells the story with excellence, but only most of the time. The weaving of biographies of the three crew members—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—along with their wives enlivened the whole adventure and added color to what was already an epic tale.
However, the author was obsessed with the possibilities of failure to the point of repeating them in many chapters; I think he recited the litany of possible SPS failure modes and their consequences at least three times, which fully pulled us out of the story. And the chapter on the insanity that was America in 1968 was interesting, but he didn’t tie it to the story of Apollo 8 at all.
Finally, the book wouldn’t end. It had about one too many chapters—once the injection back to Earth was complete, we didn’t need any more spaceflight story—an epilogue that was far, far too long (necessary, just way too much of it), and end matter that also went on forever.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the Apollo missions, but be ready to forgive some repetition and inelegance and repetition.
📚
