
One Giant Leap
The Untold Story of How We Flew to the Moon
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $22.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Fred Sanders
-
By:
-
Charles Fishman
The New York Times best-selling, "meticulously researched and absorbingly written" (The Washington Post) story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic Apollo 11 moon mission.
President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel.
When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historic speech, America had a total of 15 minutes of spaceflight experience - with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than US astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send 24 astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.
"A veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch - nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote" (The Wall Street Journal), and in One Giant Leap, Fishman has written the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises - from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. "It’s been 50 years since Neil Armstrong took that one small step. Fishman explains in dazzling form just how unbelievable it actually was" (Newsweek).
©2019 Charles Fishman (P)2019 Simon & SchusterListeners also enjoyed...




















People who viewed this also viewed...


















Great Facts but Choppy
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Brilliant Brain Motivation
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Apollo great book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I thought I knew a lot about the US space program.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Putting Apollo in context
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Space travel
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Loved It
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Ties in the context of what was happening in America in that time period.
Amazing insight!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Enjoyed it
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
If you are old enough to remember the moon landings, ‘One Giant Leap’, is a great trip down memory lane. Younger readers, for whom the moon landings are something from the history books, will find plausible explanations as to why NASA did not immediately follow going to the moon with manned missions to Mars. Instead of Mars we got the digital age, a direct spinoff of the Apollo moon mission. I am writing this review on my smart phone, the great grand child of the computers and software that had to be developed to get the Apollo mission space capsules to the moon and home again.
‘One Giant Leap, ‘ is not just about the invention of space technology but also the invention of the digital age we all live in today, presented in the context of the time, both then and now. Have fun, it’s a great story, well told.
A great title! Neil Armstrong summarized it perfectly.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.