The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon

The reader from Philadelphia is both right and wrong. When Deke Slayton's heart problem (or non-problem) was discovered, NASA doctors referred to it interchangeably as arrhythmia and a murmur. Those terms in 1999 have taken on separate meanings. Slayton himself used both terms to describe the condition, often accompanied by colorful descriptors of the medical community. Rhesus monkeys (Sam and Miss Sam) flew on two Little Joe high-altitude tests launched from Wallops Island as described. The chimps Ham and Enos flew on missions launched from Cape Canaveral and were clearly identified as chimpanzees in the text. NASA people then and now refer to all four of the flights under the generic rubric of "monkey flights." The X-15 was dropped from a B-52, not a B-29. This was corrected in the book's second printing. There remains today significant questions about whether or not the big Russian rocket was for a moon program or for a space station program. I believe it was for the latter. No cosmonaut to my knowledge has ever come forward to describe his training for a moon mission. Nor have the Russian engineers involved in their space program made such claims, beyond saying that prototype "models" of lunar spacecraft were fabricated.-- Jim Schefter, October 6, 1999

My older brother was born shortly after Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the moon and although he has no idea what occured that evening I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be sitting in front of a television that evening back in 1969 watching history unfold. I now have a much clearer picture of what led up to that evening and the significace that it has held in the hearts of many people across America. The Race is a outstanding account of of the space race from its infancy to its crowing achievment. This is deffinately a must read.

A goverment that rigs its spaceships with explosives to keep its pilots from defecting is doomed to fail and that's exactly what happened to the Soviet Union.

Thirty years ago I was sitting in a Wayne State University classroom when America's first manned sub-orbital flight took place. Didn't much care about it then. Now comes a book by a reporter who was there in the middle of it, and I'm looking at all that drama I missed. Schefter splendidly raises the curtain on the savage contest between them and us. It's a fascinating expose of how a secretive Soviet rocketman succeeded in acing our superior technology. The Race to conquer space was on. This is a terrific tale. It is amazing from this historical perspective to read how the Soviets succeeded more in pulling the wool over the world's eyes and making their space feats seem much better than they were. At the same, Schefter tells the hidden stories behind the American space program. Thirty years is a long time. It was worth the wait for this book. My guess is this will be one of the books the serious historians writing fifty years in the future will use as a source document. No question: this is an A+ read.

Thirty years ago I was sitting in a Wayne State University classroom when America's first manned sub-orbital flight took place. Didn't much care about it then. Now comes a book by a reporter who was there in the middle of it, and I'm looking at all that drama I missed. Schefter raises the curtain on the savage contest between them and us. It's a fascinating expose of how a secretive Soviet rocketman succeeded in acing our superior technology. "The Race" to conquer space was on. This is a terrific tale. It is amazing from this historical perspective to read how the Soviets succeeded in pulling the wool over the world's eyes and making their space feats seem much better than they were. At the same, Schefter tells the hidden stories behind the American space program. Thirty years is a long time. It was worth the wait for this book.My guess is this will be one of the books the serious historians writing fifty years in the future will use as a source document. No question: this is an A+ read.