num_pages: 368
description: On the night of July 20, 1969......our world changed forever: Two Americans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walked on the moon. After the horror of the Kennedy and King assassinations, amid the deepening quagmire of Vietnam, the moon landing brought the sixties to a triumphant end. But the upheavals of that decade somehow eclipsed this "one giant leap" and the even bolder explorations that followed. Now Andrew Chaikin tells the story of the Apollo missions as never before: through the eyes of the astronauts who made those heroic voyages.A decade in the making, A Man on the Moon is based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with each of the 24 moon voyagers, as well as those who contributed unprecedented brain power, training and teamwork on earth. For this commemorative edition, Chaikin and a team of Time-Life editors, researchers, and designers joined forces to bring the extra dimension of pictures to Chaikin's vibrant text. To do so, they combed the archives of NASA, as well as those of Life magazine and other publications. In addition, Chaikin made available his own extensive collection of Apollo photographs. The result, published here, is hundreds of compelling, often lyrical images assembled into a collection that may well never be equaled.Some of the pictures are famous ones, but many other have been published only rarely and obscurely. And some have never before been seen by the public. Gracing these pages are sweeping panoramas, made by joining several overlapping images, as well as acutely detailed moonscapes taken from lunar orbit. Other pictures appear as filmstrips from movie and video cameras that accompanied the astronauts to the moon.In One Giant Leap, the first volume of three, Chaikin conveys, with breathtaking immediacy, every aspect of an Apollo mission, from the rush of liftoff atop a Saturn V rocket to the heart-stopping touchdown on the moon, to the final hurdle of reentry upon return to earth. He tells of the intense competition for a seat on a moon flight, and of hour upon hour of training in spacecraft simulators to prepare for contingencies that could only be imagined. We see the early Apollo missions unfold from their tragic beginning — the spacecraft fire that killed three astronauts — to their triumph, as Neil Armstrong first sets foot on the moon.Here are the stories of a unique handful of men who have been to the farthest edge of human experience. For the first time, we learn what the men inside the space suits truly felt. Through them we can look back and understand the achievement that began on that almost mythic July night when, as Chaikin writes in his preface, "we touched the face of another world, and became a people without limits."
language: English
title: A Man on the Moon
titlecomplete: A Man on the Moon
genres: Adventure, Space, History, Aviation, Astronomy, American History, Biography, Science, Audiobook, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 6837
awards: awardedAt: 1451635200000
name: Audie Award
category: History/Biography
publisher: Time Life Education