Safety Design for Space Systems Book

Neil Armstrong's death earlier this fall had a profound impact on me. It served as a stark wakeup call and reminder that even boyhood heroes who slip the surly bonds of Earth with such majesty and dignity cannot live forever. I remember thinking on the day Armstrong died that is death was "one giant loss" to mankind, and I still feel that today. I remember that Sunday afternoon when the lunar landing actually happened. I was in my dad's pickup, high in the Uinta mountains. My folks were packing the truck to come home from a successful weekend camping trip; I was too enthralled with the moon landing to help, and they were too wise and intelligent to force me out of that truck. Its windows were down, its doors were open, and the lunar landing feed was being pumped at me through the blow torch signal of KSL radio.

Even now, I remember vividly the dialogue between Armstrong and Aldrin as he, Aldrin, described what he could see as Armstrong manually piloted Eagle to a safe landing spot. It would be years before I would fully understand the comment from the ground "you have a bunch of guys down here about to turn blue" as a reference to the ship's perilously empty fuel tanks.

Craig Nelson's ability to so eloquently tell the story of the Apollo 11 success enabled me to relive the magnificence of that one shining day in my boyhood as nothing has before. But that's only a tiny part of why this book matters and why you should read it.

I've read many of the books that deal with the space race, and this one will go down as my all-time favorite. Here's why:

First, it humanizes these astronauts in ways that left me constantly charmed and amazed. In fact, so enthused was I as I read this that my wife checked the print copy out from the local library and finished it as well this weekend. She found it a sheer pleasure to read, and remarked frequently as she read about some of the fascinating facts presented here that you simply don't get elsewhere and that force you to really think.

First, you should understand that this book is not an exhaustive treatise on the American space program. It pays brief attention to the Mercury program, even less so to Gemini, but it focuses heavily on the Apollo portion, particularly Apollo 11. There's nothing in this that smacks of boring names and dates. You go into the lives of these astronauts and their families. You agonize with NASA officials about budgetary decisions that can make all the difference in whether men come home alive or never come home at all. Did you know, for example, that President Nixon had, prior to the Apollo 11 flight, written a speech announcing to the American people that the two men of the lunar module were forever stranded and would die on the moon? He did indeed, and there is a brief excerpt from that speech in this book.

You'll read about how Aldrin and Armstrong debated as to which would actually be the first to step onto the lunar surface, with Aldrin strongly pushing for him to be the one, and Armstrong, in that laconic manner of his, ultimately putting an end to the debate. You will read with some wistful sadness of the fact that so few pictures of Armstrong were actually taken while on the moon. You'll read about how they handle floating vomit and how they defecate in zero-gravity. It's all in here.

You'll read about the young marine who, upon opening the capsule at splash-down is shaken'not by how the three men look, but by how they smelled after so long in space. You'll read about the mushy foods they had to eat, and you'll read about Michael Collins and his extreme isolation whenever the main module of Apollo 11 went around the side of the moon that prevented him from communicating with Earth or with his comrades on the moon.

In short, this is a beautiful story breathtakingly told. Perhaps you're one of those readers who is easily pushed away from a book where there might be long or detailed scientific explanations. That won't be a problem here. Where there is a need for scientific explanations, they are presented in wonderfully plain language that will in no way leave you confused or uninterested. How does all this impact the children of these astronauts? It's all in this book.

Nelson takes you skillfully through the early days of the space program when the Russians were succeeding time after time, leaving American shaken and wondering whether a dictatorship was indeed better than a democracy in terms of providing the talent and resources necessary to go into space. So acrimonious was the space race at one point that the Russians sent an unmanned rocket up at the same time as Apollo 11 was journeying to the moon. Russia's hope was that Apollo 11 would spectacularly fail and that its rocket would successfully land on the surface. Of course, history points out that just the opposite was true. This book, as no other has for me, points out with stark clarity that the space race may have been a massive factor in the prevention of nuclear war between the two super powers during the height of the cold war. The author postulates that had the two nations not sought to achieve astronautical supremacy, they might have poured even more of their energies into achieving nuclear supremacy, which could have ended badly for everyone concerned.

There's plenty in this book to smile about as well. There's a great story here about a Congressman who insisted, despite the pleas of NASA officials, on seeing the chimp training facility involved in gearing a chimp up to go into space.

The Congressman's visit happened on a day on which a monkey had finished some arduous training which had frightened it. When it saw the Congressman, it apparently defecated, picked up its newly minted calling card, and hurled it dead center against the Congressman's chest. He belatedly understood why NASA officials had initially begged him not to enter the facility at that point.

To the degree that it can, this book even puts a human face on the more than 400,000 contract employees who made the moon landing possible. You'll read about what happened to some of the lunar mineral samples brought back, and you will experience real sorrow as you watch three men whose lives could never again be the same upon their return to Earth adjust to those new lives with varying degrees of success. Ironically enough, it seems to be Michael Collins whose life was the least marred by the Apollo 11 experience. But that's all in here, and there's a better explanation of what I mean by that if you decide to read this.

Nelson's writing style is as on-course and powerful as the Saturn V. rocket that launched the craft into space that July. His access to the astronauts and even to once-classified documents paid off handsomely in this book. In short, if you were too young to have meaningful memories of Apollo 11, this book will give you an accurate feel for what it was like to experience. If you remember it vividly, you will find in these pages not merely a reaffirmation of your memories but scores and scores of additional reasons to be impressed by the endeavor and thrilled that you lived during that time.