What the country needs now is more heroes. Not the celebrities that the media fixates on, but the real deal.
That’s what I thought after reading Rocket Men: the Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson. I picked it up after hearing about the winding down of NASA’s manned space shuttle program – and all the excitement came back. The author recreates the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, and gives us compelling details about the astronauts, the mission, and the space race.
Raise your hand if you remember where you were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Didn’t we feel that, if we could do that, anything was possible? I wish that we still thought that today. And unbelievably, I’ve heard that they accomplished this with less computer power than we have on today’s desktops.
Another classic read is The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, about the earlier Mercury astronauts, their wives, and their test pilot predecessors. Although they had flaws, they also had the courage “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
A great childhood memoir by a retired NASA engineer is Rocket Boys: a Memoir by Homer Hickam, Jr., which was later filmed as October Sky. I loved the story of how the author and his friends inspired, and eventually escaped, their West Virginia coal town by making homemade rockets.
While you’re at it, check out the DVD of Apollo 13. Although we know the ending, this movie is still incredibly suspenseful. Can you imagine yourself being given a small box of parts, and told that you needed to use only them to fix a space capsule, in a tiny amount of time, or everyone dies. Talk about MacGyver in space.
These guys were my heroes, back in the day. So who are your heroes (of either gender)?
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