Voices from the Moon
What it was like, in the astronauts’ own words. Excerpts from a new book by Andrew Chaikin.
- By Andrew Chaikin with Victoria Kohl
- AirSpaceMag.com, May 20, 2009
NASA
People don’t understand—they really don’t understand, the average Joe on the street…that this isn’t some great ----ing experience that, you know, is mystical, magical, changes your whole life, Jesus Christ, this, that, and the other thing. It’s just a ----ing pile of rocks that happen to be 250,000 miles away! It was a real challenge and a hell of a lot fun to get there. But after it’s all over, you can’t say that that’s where you want to retire because it’s pretty. It’s not. It’s beautiful in its starkness, but you don’t want to sit there forever and look at gray rocks! Or brown rocks, whatever.
—Pete Conrad, Apollo 12 commander
(Photo: The cost of getting to fly to the moon: Pete Conrad exploring the Ocean of Storms.)
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Comments (1)
Another excellent book on this is Rocket Men by Craig Nelson. What I found fascinating about this book was the way Nelson deftly wove together the Apollo story with ongoing global events. The likes of Werner Von Brown, Walt Disney, Khrushchev, the Cold War, all come together in such a way as to shed a new light on an often told story.
Posted by Dave on July 18,2009 | 08:59 AM