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  • Chasing the Moon

  • The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America into the Space Age
  • Written by: Robert Stone, Alan Andres
  • Narrated by: Holter Graham
  • Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins

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Chasing the Moon

Written by: Robert Stone, Alan Andres
Narrated by: Holter Graham
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Publisher's Summary

JFK issued the historic moon landing challenge. These are the stories of the visionaries who helped America complete his vision with the first lunar landing 50 years ago.

A Companion Book to the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE® Film on PBS®

Going in depth to explore their stories beyond the PBS series, writer/producer Robert Stone - called “one of our most important documentary filmmakers” by Entertainment Weekly - brings these important figures to brilliant life. 

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed the nation spend $20 billion to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Based on eyewitness accounts and newly discovered archival material, Chasing the Moon reveals for the first time the unknown stories of the fascinating individuals whose imaginative work across several decades culminated in America’s momentous achievement. More than a story of engineers and astronauts, the moon landing - now celebrating its 50th anniversary - grew out of the dreams of science fiction writers, filmmakers, military geniuses, and rule-breaking scientists. They include: 

  • Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, whose writing inspired some of the key players in the moon race. A scientific paper he wrote in his 20s led to the US beating Russia in one area of space: communications satellites. 
  • Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi military genius who oversaw Hitler's rocket weapons program. After working on ballistic missiles for the US Army, he was recruited by NASA to manage the creation of the Saturn V moon rocket. 
  • Astronaut Frank Borman, commander of the first mission to circumnavigate the moon, whose powerful testimony before Congress in 1967 decisively saved the US lunar program from being cancelled. 
  • Poppy Northcutt, a young mathematician who was the first woman to work in Mission Control. Her media exposure as a unique presence in this all-male world allowed her the freedom to stand up for equal rights for women and minorities. 
  • Edward Dwight, an African American astronaut candidate, recruited at the urging of the Kennedy White House to further the administration’s civil rights agenda - but not everyone welcomed his inclusion.

Setting these key players in the political, social, and cultural climate of the time, Chasing the Moon focuses on the science and the history but, most important, the extraordinary individuals behind what was undoubtedly the greatest human achievement of the 20th century.

©2019 Robert L. Stone (P)2019 Random House Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

What the critics say

Chasing the Moon is rich, lively, and deeply human - a thriller of its own to parallel PBS’s American Experience series on the moon program.” (Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of Energy: A Human History

Chasing the Moon tells the story I've lived for most of my life. From my testing of the lunar module on Apollo 9 to my hopes for the future as we celebrate Apollo’s fiftieth anniversary, it’s all there, and told through the personal experiences of the people who lived it. Some of it familiar, some never told before, this is a very human account of a truly historic moment as humankind emerges into the larger cosmos.” (Russell “Rusty” Schweickart, astronaut, Apollo 9)

“Designed to be a companion volume to a documentary film, Chasing the Moon is so informative and so entertaining that it can easily stand on its own as a popular history of the Space Race. Stone and Andres capture not only the Cold War rivalry and turmoil of the period, but its heady optimism.” (Joseph Kanon, New York Times best-selling author of The Good German

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