One Giant Leap (book)

• 1. Introduction

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  Neil Armstrong's name barely appears in Charles Fishman's One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon, published in 2019. Fishman concentrated instead on the hundreds of thousands of workers whose names appear on no mission patch. What did it actually cost in human effort to reach the moon? And what did building Apollo leave behind, beyond the footprints?

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• 2. The Half-Million

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  Between 1961 and 1966, roughly half a million workers at some 20,000 companies were designing, building, or assembling pieces of the Apollo program. Robert Schaefer, a research engineer at MIT Haystack Observatory, put that scale in a recognizable context. Had Apollo been incorporated as a company, it would have ranked larger than every business in the Fortune 500 except General Motors. Fishman counted the contributors at 410,000 men and women spread across those same 20,000 firms. Fishman examines three of those contributors in particular: Charles Stark Draper, Bill Tindall, and John Houbolt.

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• 3. Three Indispensable Engineers

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  Charles Stark Draper led the MIT Instrumentation Lab, which designed the Apollo Guidance Computer. Bill Tindall came from the Langley Research Center; Fishman describes him as a talented writer and orbital mechanics genius. John Houbolt was a NASA engineer who championed the approach called lunar orbit rendezvous, or LOR.

  All three belong to what Fishman calls the often overlooked scientists and engineers of Apollo. Their work fed into a larger argument the book makes about what the program ultimately left behind.

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• 4. The Digital Age Argument

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  Fishman's central claim about Apollo's legacy is not about space. He writes that "Apollo didn't usher in the Space Age, but it did usher in the Digital Age." He argues the program helped lay the foundation for the technology behind the digital revolution. He goes further. Apollo gave Americans a sense of excitement about the Digital Age that had been, in his words, "completely missing before the 1960s began."

  Robert Schaefer, reviewing the book, found the argument illuminating. He wrote that One Giant Leap gave him an understanding of "America as it was and how it changed with the Apollo mission."

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• 5. Critical Reception

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  Mark Whitaker's review in the Washington Post described One Giant Leap as "meticulously researched and absorbingly written." Kirkus Reviews called it "a fresh, enthusiastic history of the moon mission."

  NASA was planning to return astronauts to the moon within the next decade. In that context, the National Space Society called One Giant Leap "a reminder about what is required to achieve epic results."

  Schaefer called Fishman "a really, really good storyteller" and predicted One Giant Leap would make a fantastic audio book. His one complaint was that 480 pages was not enough. He wished for more on the Mercury and Gemini missions preceding Apollo, more on the Saturn V, and more on each Apollo astronaut's discoveries. That list gives the next historian of Apollo a clear starting point.

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