Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

by Robert Kurson

As always, Susan smiled and clasped his hand. Inside, she was dying. The Moon? she thought, trying to absorb what he was telling her. It was August. NASA hadn’t even tested the command module yet. December—that was what, four months away? Usually crews trained for a year or more. To the Moon? She told Frank how proud she was, how important the mission sounded, that there was no better man for the job.

Susan knew Frank had enough pressure at work, and she considered it her mission to make home a place where he never worried.

he considered Susan his secret weapon, a partner, mother, and best friend who arranged their lives so that his only worries were in cockpits.

Doing this would not, as many believed, cause the spacecraft to leave Earth orbit; rather, it would simply change the shape of Apollo 8’s orbit around Earth from a near circle into a highly elongated ellipse, one that would stretch all the way from Earth to the Moon and back.

the Van Allen belts, two massive, doughnut-shaped bands of intense radiation that encircle Earth.

the vast majority of the lunar surface is coated in a mixture of powdery dust and pulverized rock fragments known as regolith.

Borman, Lovell, and Anders had changed that. Today, on December 24, 1968, when humankind opened their eyes, three of their own had arrived.

the Moon’s terminator—the line that divides dark from light on the lunar surface—to

NASA made four more manned trips to the Moon after Apollo 13, all of which successfully landed crews on the surface. Collectively, the astronauts on the Apollo missions returned almost 842 pounds of lunar soil and rock, samples that continue to form the bedrock upon which our understanding of the solar system’s origins is based. In all, twelve Americans walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972.

Anders improved the division, all while absorbing the management style of GE’s young new CEO, Jack Welch, who pushed to consolidate, simplify, move fast, and stay only in businesses in which his company could rank first or second in the industry.