Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module

Images of America: New York

by Joshua Stoff

In 1961, after the United States had acquired a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience, President John F. Kennedy announced his plans for landing a man on the moon by 1970. The space race had begun. In 1962, after a strenuous competition, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation of Bethpage, Long Island, had won the contract to build the lunar module-the spacecraft that would take Americans to the moon. This was the first, and the only, vehicle designed to take humans from one world to another.

Although much has been written about the first men to set foot on the moon, those first hesitant steps would not have been possible without the efforts of the designers and technicians assigned to Project Apollo. Building Moonships: The Grumman Lunar Module tells the story of the people who built and tested the lunar modules that were deployed on missions as well as the modules that never saw the light of day. This is the first publication to chronicle the visual history of the design, construction, and launch of the lunar module-one of the most historic machines in all of human history.

Genres: History, Space, Nonfiction

172 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 23, 2004

Reviews

[Ruth C. Weimer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting

I found the book and it's photos/drawings a great insight into the build of the great American moonship! I learned a lot about the craft and it's contractors than I had known. I enjoyed studying the drawings and comparing them with the photographs. I've seen the actual LM up close and thought they were very flimsy but failed to realize that they were built to fly in the vacuum of space around and on the moon. Good Stuff!!

[John Peel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd always known that the Lunar Modules were built on Long Island by Grumman, but that was pretty much it. This picture-packed book explains the process in detail, and in a very interesting manner. Drawing on Grumman archives, there's a lot of previously unseen material. Very well done.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each photo has a nice long caption. Includes some interesting concept designs.

[Mark D. Schnittman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great overview of the LM used for Apollo

Lots of great pictures, and accompanied by interesting captions, this is a must read for the space nuts among us. Well done!

[Raja99 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why I Read This Book: We've been watching the documentary series When We Left Earth, and that has rekindled my interest in the Apollo project.

I consider the Apollo project to be the high point of human space exploration. I'd be willing to argue that it's also the most amazing big science/engineering project in human history--only the Manhattan Project comes close, and I'm a lot less fond of its achievement.

In the years since then, watching what NASA and other huge projects have achieved, I think the most amazing thing about Apollo, really, is that we spent the money and it achieved its goals. NASA has spent other huge amounts of money on e.g. the Shuttle and the ISS with far less result. (To be fair, I haven't tried correcting for inflation.)

Anyway, to bring this to this particular book: Chariots for Apollo, by Stoff and Charles Pellegrino, is an excellent book I read a few years back about how the Lunar Module was designed and made. This is like a companion volume; it consists of hundreds of black-and-white photos of LMs, prototypes, blueprints, and so on ... there's not much text, except for the captions, some of which are very revealing indeed.

Some of the photos are blurry, and some of them really cry out for color. Hmm, perhaps the best medium for this would have been a web site ( half ;-)

In any case, I recommend that anyone with an interest in Apollo in general, and the LMs in particular, read this book. It may not be something you want to own, but it's definitely worth a look.

(Finished the evening of 2008-11-22.)

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides some fun insight into the building of the apollo lunar lander. It is mostly pictures taken at the Grumman facility during the building and testing phase of the LM. There are a few nuggets that make this book interesting.

I liked it because I am a moon nerd.