What do you think?
Rate this book
The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America's First Moon Missions
The moon landing of 1969 stands as an iconic moment for both the United States and humankind. The familiar story focuses on the journey of the brave astronauts, who brought home Moon rocks and startling photographs. But Apollo's full account includes the earthbound engineers, mounds of their crumpled paper, and smoldering metal shards of exploded engines. How exactly did the nation, step by difficult step, take men to the Moon and back?
In The Apollo Chronicles, fifty years after the moon landing, author Brandon R. Brown, himself the son of an Apollo engineer, revisits the men and women who toiled behind the lights. He relays the defining twentieth-century project from its roots, bringing the engineers' work and personalities to bright life on the page. Set against the backdrop of a turbulent American decade, the narrative whisks audiences through tense deadlines and technical miracles, from President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to NASA's 1969 lunar triumph, as engineers confronted wave after wave of previously unthinkable challenges.
Brown immerses readers in key physical hurdles--from building the world's most powerful rockets to keeping humans alive in the hostile void of space--using language free of acronyms and technical jargon. The book also pulls back from the detailed tasks and asks larger questions. What did we learn about the Moon? And what can this uniquely innovative project teach us today?
In The Apollo Chronicles, fifty years after the moon landing, author Brandon R. Brown, himself the son of an Apollo engineer, revisits the men and women who toiled behind the lights. He relays the defining twentieth-century project from its roots, bringing the engineers' work and personalities to bright life on the page. Set against the backdrop of a turbulent American decade, the narrative whisks audiences through tense deadlines and technical miracles, from President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to NASA's 1969 lunar triumph, as engineers confronted wave after wave of previously unthinkable challenges.
Brown immerses readers in key physical hurdles--from building the world's most powerful rockets to keeping humans alive in the hostile void of space--using language free of acronyms and technical jargon. The book also pulls back from the detailed tasks and asks larger questions. What did we learn about the Moon? And what can this uniquely innovative project teach us today?
288 pages, Hardcover
Published June 7, 2019
22 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
Brandon R. Brown
5 books10 followersBrandon R. Brown is a Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. He completed doctoral training in superconductivity, with postdoctoral work in science communication. His biophysics work on the electric sense of sharks, as covered by NPR and the BBC, has appeared in Nature, The Physical Review, and other research journals. His writing for general audiences has appeared in New Scientist, SEED, the Huffington Post, and other outlets.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 20, 2021
The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America's First Moon Missions is a very welcome addition to manned space missions. Not only it is welcome, it is also readable.
The author Brandon R. Brown's father worked as a Apollo engineer and this connection and the pride, stress, jubilation and indeed frustrations, these thousands of men and women felt shines through.
The story covers the early days from 1945 and how the US mopped up hundreds of German scientists and engineers and brought them to America to work on rockets, principally for the military. We then move into what became the space race USSR's early leads and domination through Sputnik, animals and then to Gagarin. All the while with the US trying to learn and catch up through its Mercury (1958-63), and following JFK's May 1961 declaration to land on the Moon by the end of that decade, the second and third manned space programmes, Gemini (1961-66), and Apollo (1961-72), that would successfully rise out of Earth orbit to test men and machines by
orbiting and then successfully landing 12 (twelve) astronauts on the Moon.
Behind these programmes comes Mr Brown's story of how NASA and the engineers designed, created, built and tested [relentlessly] every single item of kit needed to launch rockets and send astronauts to live in to the deadly and unforgiving environment of space.
The stories include engineers and how they came to NASA: some from military service, others fresh out of education; others (sometimes on secondment) from commercial or other Federal agencies. What comes across throughout the book is the keenness and inventiveness, but also a determination and application that drove them to work hours and hours often slipping home for a few hours sleep and then back in Monday-Sunday. There are comments on how this challenged family life and marriages in what for most were new towns - often literally - far from bigger towns and cities.
Naturally, there is much in the book about rocket and spacecraft designs, wiring, computers, and fuel, but also featured are, perhaps surprisingly, sewing (space suits), model making (training) and food (who knew food standards and production was fundamentally changed by NASA standards and testing regimes?). All written in a easy-to-read style that never "talks down" to the reader but recognises the subject/s could be overwhelming and in places very dull.
A final chapter meets a few of these engineers, now in their 80s, for their reflections on what it meant for them to be a part of Apollo.
Overall, this is a triumph of a book in that it reads easily covering a complex and complicate subject bringing to centre stage the men and women who engineered America's first moon missions.
My copy was a 1st Edition, Oxford University Press hardback, published in 2019 with 269 pages.
Edited to correct a couple of spelling mistakes.
The author Brandon R. Brown's father worked as a Apollo engineer and this connection and the pride, stress, jubilation and indeed frustrations, these thousands of men and women felt shines through.
The story covers the early days from 1945 and how the US mopped up hundreds of German scientists and engineers and brought them to America to work on rockets, principally for the military. We then move into what became the space race USSR's early leads and domination through Sputnik, animals and then to Gagarin. All the while with the US trying to learn and catch up through its Mercury (1958-63), and following JFK's May 1961 declaration to land on the Moon by the end of that decade, the second and third manned space programmes, Gemini (1961-66), and Apollo (1961-72), that would successfully rise out of Earth orbit to test men and machines by
orbiting and then successfully landing 12 (twelve) astronauts on the Moon.
Behind these programmes comes Mr Brown's story of how NASA and the engineers designed, created, built and tested [relentlessly] every single item of kit needed to launch rockets and send astronauts to live in to the deadly and unforgiving environment of space.
The stories include engineers and how they came to NASA: some from military service, others fresh out of education; others (sometimes on secondment) from commercial or other Federal agencies. What comes across throughout the book is the keenness and inventiveness, but also a determination and application that drove them to work hours and hours often slipping home for a few hours sleep and then back in Monday-Sunday. There are comments on how this challenged family life and marriages in what for most were new towns - often literally - far from bigger towns and cities.
Naturally, there is much in the book about rocket and spacecraft designs, wiring, computers, and fuel, but also featured are, perhaps surprisingly, sewing (space suits), model making (training) and food (who knew food standards and production was fundamentally changed by NASA standards and testing regimes?). All written in a easy-to-read style that never "talks down" to the reader but recognises the subject/s could be overwhelming and in places very dull.
A final chapter meets a few of these engineers, now in their 80s, for their reflections on what it meant for them to be a part of Apollo.
Overall, this is a triumph of a book in that it reads easily covering a complex and complicate subject bringing to centre stage the men and women who engineered America's first moon missions.
My copy was a 1st Edition, Oxford University Press hardback, published in 2019 with 269 pages.
Edited to correct a couple of spelling mistakes.
November 23, 2019
There were two reasons I wasn't expecting much from this book. Firstly, there have been so many titles on the Apollo programme and the space race. And secondly, a book that focusses on the engineering involved would surely be far too much at the nut and bolt level (literally), missing out on the overarching drama that makes the story live. Also there were so many people involved - 400,000 is mentioned - that we couldn't have much human interest because we would be bombarded with lists of names.
Instead, I was charmed by Brandon Brown's account. His father was one of the engineers, but he isn't given undue prominence - Brown picks out a handful of characters and follows them through, bringing in others as necessary, but never overwhelming us with names. And while it's true that there is a lot of nitty gritty engineering detail, it rarely becomes dull. Somehow, Brown pulls off the feat of making the day-to-day, hectic engineering work engaging.
I think in part this was because so much went wrong along the way. The Apollo 11 landing apart, the two things that really stand out in the memory about the Apollo programme are when things went wrong - the terrible disaster of Apollo 1 and the skin-of-the-teeth survival of Apollo 13. What Brown gives us on a much smaller scale is a whole litany of problems that the engineers faced and overcame. Just occasionally (twice, to be precise) there were a few pages where things did get a little slow, but mostly this was genuinely fascinating.
One of the things that most impressed me is that, by the end of the book, I really understood why it has been so long since anything significant has been achieved in manned space flight. It had always seem strange how everything just seemed to stop, but Brown makes it clear what an exceptional effort Apollo was, how it would have been impossible to continue with that intensity and how NASA lost its drive. He is also good in setting the political background alongside the race for space - not just the rivalry with the Soviet Union, but also things like the Vietnam war, the peace movement and other, wider political concerns.
The only small negatives I can find are that Brown can sometimes be too folksy in his language and the disappointment that a book published by OUP should only have units like degrees Fahrenheit, pounds and miles. I appreciate they're looking to the US market, but it wouldn't have harmed to have had scientific units too. But there's nothing to put anyone off. It's a great addition to anything you may have read about the space race with so much material I've never seen before.
Instead, I was charmed by Brandon Brown's account. His father was one of the engineers, but he isn't given undue prominence - Brown picks out a handful of characters and follows them through, bringing in others as necessary, but never overwhelming us with names. And while it's true that there is a lot of nitty gritty engineering detail, it rarely becomes dull. Somehow, Brown pulls off the feat of making the day-to-day, hectic engineering work engaging.
I think in part this was because so much went wrong along the way. The Apollo 11 landing apart, the two things that really stand out in the memory about the Apollo programme are when things went wrong - the terrible disaster of Apollo 1 and the skin-of-the-teeth survival of Apollo 13. What Brown gives us on a much smaller scale is a whole litany of problems that the engineers faced and overcame. Just occasionally (twice, to be precise) there were a few pages where things did get a little slow, but mostly this was genuinely fascinating.
One of the things that most impressed me is that, by the end of the book, I really understood why it has been so long since anything significant has been achieved in manned space flight. It had always seem strange how everything just seemed to stop, but Brown makes it clear what an exceptional effort Apollo was, how it would have been impossible to continue with that intensity and how NASA lost its drive. He is also good in setting the political background alongside the race for space - not just the rivalry with the Soviet Union, but also things like the Vietnam war, the peace movement and other, wider political concerns.
The only small negatives I can find are that Brown can sometimes be too folksy in his language and the disappointment that a book published by OUP should only have units like degrees Fahrenheit, pounds and miles. I appreciate they're looking to the US market, but it wouldn't have harmed to have had scientific units too. But there's nothing to put anyone off. It's a great addition to anything you may have read about the space race with so much material I've never seen before.
November 8, 2020
The building of the atomic bomb and the Apollo moon missions are two examples of the colossal might and ingenuity of 20th century American industry. Of the two, the Apollo missions are obviously the more salubrious but both projects demonstrate what America could once accomplish if she so desired.
One quickly runs out of superlatives to describe the incredible accomplishments of NASA engineers in the 1960s. Most powerful rocket engines ever built, fastest/farthest humans have ever gone, the audacity to take a separate ship to land on the moon which would then rendezvous back to the mothership 400,000 Kms away from any help, the list goes on. In an analysis of what enabled Apollo XI to succeed despite literally astronomical odds, Neil Armstrong identifies a confluence of four factors - leadership (of a young, reckless US president), threat (Soviets beating the Americans to space with Sputnik), economy (a booming economy that allowed Congress to earmark up to 4% of the federal budget to NASA) and talent (a glut of post WW-II US engineers educated at world-class universities at little to no cost thanks to the GI bill).
I couldn't help contrasting attitudes then and now. We are 50 years removed from the heady days of manned Moon missions and there is pressing need to solve equally daunting problems here on earth, global warming primary among them. The one factor sorely lacking in Armstrong's list above is leadership, both American and global. The world economy has changed and where once America stood alone, there are many other countries now that can contribute their money and talent if only political leaders step up and enable them.
Humanity once showed that it can aspire for the stars and reach them too. Can we now convince ourselves not to trash our own planet?
One quickly runs out of superlatives to describe the incredible accomplishments of NASA engineers in the 1960s. Most powerful rocket engines ever built, fastest/farthest humans have ever gone, the audacity to take a separate ship to land on the moon which would then rendezvous back to the mothership 400,000 Kms away from any help, the list goes on. In an analysis of what enabled Apollo XI to succeed despite literally astronomical odds, Neil Armstrong identifies a confluence of four factors - leadership (of a young, reckless US president), threat (Soviets beating the Americans to space with Sputnik), economy (a booming economy that allowed Congress to earmark up to 4% of the federal budget to NASA) and talent (a glut of post WW-II US engineers educated at world-class universities at little to no cost thanks to the GI bill).
I couldn't help contrasting attitudes then and now. We are 50 years removed from the heady days of manned Moon missions and there is pressing need to solve equally daunting problems here on earth, global warming primary among them. The one factor sorely lacking in Armstrong's list above is leadership, both American and global. The world economy has changed and where once America stood alone, there are many other countries now that can contribute their money and talent if only political leaders step up and enable them.
Humanity once showed that it can aspire for the stars and reach them too. Can we now convince ourselves not to trash our own planet?
July 20, 2019
What we can do when we decide it has to be done.
The science, engineering, mathematics, creativity, and dedication to have made this thing happen are mind-boggling.
This book is a delightful overview of the US space program in its early years.
I recommend it without reservation.
The science, engineering, mathematics, creativity, and dedication to have made this thing happen are mind-boggling.
This book is a delightful overview of the US space program in its early years.
I recommend it without reservation.
December 11, 2020
I Thoroughly enjoyed this book, and if you are the kind of person who is fascinated by what happens behind the button when you push it, you will love it, too.
This is the kind of book you read if you are fascinated by what happens under the hood and behind the scenes. There are those among us who simply prefer to push a button and immediately get a result. They are pretty much unconcerned about how that result happens. But there are geeks among us who are equally interested in visiting a page like How Stuff Works to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes. If you are such a person, I suspect you will find this book fascinating. The author doesn’t fill it with the kind of human-interest drama that you would expect from a book about the Apollo program. The drama is there, of course, but it focuses more on the equipment and the machinery. You don't learn a great deal about the emotions of the men who stood on the moon. You do learn about the disadvantages of their suits, and you learn how those suits changed overtime. You also get a tiny glimpse of soviet space engineering, but this primarily focuses on the Apollo program. The author's father was a NASA engineer. The author draws some of his information in the book from his father's papers.
I wish I had done a better job describing some of the incidents the author writes about here. They really are fascinating. You read about a dropped oxygen tank that caused Apollo seven's fire. There is a fascinating story about the engineering that created the explosion in Apollo 13. Of course, we all know the harrowing story of how those men came home alive, but if you read this book, you'll read about how the engineers designed solutions on the ground that helped keep them alive albeit cold.
This is the kind of book you read if you are fascinated by what happens under the hood and behind the scenes. There are those among us who simply prefer to push a button and immediately get a result. They are pretty much unconcerned about how that result happens. But there are geeks among us who are equally interested in visiting a page like How Stuff Works to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes. If you are such a person, I suspect you will find this book fascinating. The author doesn’t fill it with the kind of human-interest drama that you would expect from a book about the Apollo program. The drama is there, of course, but it focuses more on the equipment and the machinery. You don't learn a great deal about the emotions of the men who stood on the moon. You do learn about the disadvantages of their suits, and you learn how those suits changed overtime. You also get a tiny glimpse of soviet space engineering, but this primarily focuses on the Apollo program. The author's father was a NASA engineer. The author draws some of his information in the book from his father's papers.
I wish I had done a better job describing some of the incidents the author writes about here. They really are fascinating. You read about a dropped oxygen tank that caused Apollo seven's fire. There is a fascinating story about the engineering that created the explosion in Apollo 13. Of course, we all know the harrowing story of how those men came home alive, but if you read this book, you'll read about how the engineers designed solutions on the ground that helped keep them alive albeit cold.
October 30, 2019
A very well-told story of the engineers - most in their early 20’s straight out of college - responsible for the landing on the moon from the start-up in 1958 through 1970; the issues they faced, the solutions they evolved, and the culture responsible for giving them the flexibility to make it all work.
January 19, 2021
A dedicated, detailed, extremely well researched, nuanced and humane recount of the Apollo project. It really brings home the immense amount of effort and ingenuity it took NASA to put a man on the Moon.
April 25, 2020
I'm an engineer and I truly appreciated this book. Some of the bureaucratic challeges the engineers faced are still true in this day and age (although different).
February 25, 2021
I really enjoyed this book. It took me back to my childhood and youth, when watching rocket launches and even the moon landing was high entertainment. Popular Science frequently featured stories on the space race. My dad even subscribed to a NASA periodical that provided short summaries of technical discoveries suitable for use to develop new products and technologies.
I was hoping for more engineering meat in the book; that's why only four stars.
The feeling I got from the book is that Apollo was a point-solution, that it was just barely capable of getting to the moon and back, and not easily extended to further missions. This was especially true with regard to shielding from solar flares and cosmic rays:
"Recent studies of long-duration space missions . . . aren't encouraging. The human body exhibits a great deal of stress away from its natural home. And instead of days, any trip to Mars will take many months, leaving astronauts riddled with cosmic rays and risking many more rolls of the solar flare dice. Chances of brain damage and leukemia would skyrocket. Some scientists estimate, for instance, that about one-third of an astronaut's brain cells would have been struck by cosmic rays for a thirty-month round-trip to Mars."
I just don't see that any earth entity would be willing to put forth the effort and expense to undertake such an endeavor. Until there's some economic reason to go further, or even back to the moon, I don't see that happening. Not only did I live through the time of the best bands, but also humankind's greatest reach. Unmanned vehicles may go out there, but humans won't. It's just too hard.
I was hoping for more engineering meat in the book; that's why only four stars.
The feeling I got from the book is that Apollo was a point-solution, that it was just barely capable of getting to the moon and back, and not easily extended to further missions. This was especially true with regard to shielding from solar flares and cosmic rays:
"Recent studies of long-duration space missions . . . aren't encouraging. The human body exhibits a great deal of stress away from its natural home. And instead of days, any trip to Mars will take many months, leaving astronauts riddled with cosmic rays and risking many more rolls of the solar flare dice. Chances of brain damage and leukemia would skyrocket. Some scientists estimate, for instance, that about one-third of an astronaut's brain cells would have been struck by cosmic rays for a thirty-month round-trip to Mars."
I just don't see that any earth entity would be willing to put forth the effort and expense to undertake such an endeavor. Until there's some economic reason to go further, or even back to the moon, I don't see that happening. Not only did I live through the time of the best bands, but also humankind's greatest reach. Unmanned vehicles may go out there, but humans won't. It's just too hard.
February 13, 2025
Very good. I thought the engineering would be over my head, but this was more about the character and personalities of the engineers. Enjoyed this book very much.
September 3, 2025
First goodreads review because why not.
Reading this book felt like finishing the first class in my undergrad ochem series. It took mild effort, had good payoffs educationally, and I'm moderately satisfied by the ending.
For sure read this if you're into space- Henry Pohl is the goat
Pictured above: me trying to finish this book because I love space but f****** struggle with non-fiction (that's why it got 3 stars)
Reading this book felt like finishing the first class in my undergrad ochem series. It took mild effort, had good payoffs educationally, and I'm moderately satisfied by the ending.
For sure read this if you're into space- Henry Pohl is the goat
Pictured above: me trying to finish this book because I love space but f****** struggle with non-fiction (that's why it got 3 stars)
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews