Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis by Roger D Launius

by Roger D. Launius

First published in 1994 in the NASA Monograph in Aerospace History series. From the "On 25 May 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced to the nation a goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. This decision involved much study and review prior to making it public, and tremendous expenditure and effort to make it a reality by 1969. Only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled the Apollo program's size as the largest non- military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States; only the Manhattan Project was comparable in a wartime setting. The human spaceflight imperative was a direct outgrowth of it; Projects Mercury (at least in its latter stages), Gemini, and Apollo were each designed to execute it. It was finally successfully accomplished on 20 July 1969, when Apollo 11's astronaut Neil Armstrong left the Lunar Module and set foot on the surface of the Moon." Illustrated.

Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Dr. Roger D. Launius earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (American frontier and military history).

Dr. Launius was a civilian historian with the United States Air Force, and became Chief Historian for the Military Airlift Command. Since October 1990 he is Chief Historian for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He is also Senior Curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

He is also involved in the study of nineteenth century history and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church).

Reviews

[Craig Beyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy the juxtaposition of the technical, management, and political aspects of the Apollo Program as described in this book. This book is an excellent, high-level summary of the Apollo Program, missing only a more detailed description of the end of the Program and the cuts made for budgetary reasons, the political value of Apollo having receded in the minds of the president and Congress (shame on them for letting the science get away).