Apollo on the Moon

With all that has been written about man's journey to the moon, the general public still knows little of precisely what our astronauts will do once they get there, why they are doing it, and what they are likely to find.  Here, then, is the first detailed and authoritative anticipation of man's initial steps onto the moon –in effect, a scenario that will be acted out in the coming weeks, months, and years.  It is a projection of the climactic moments of the Apollo space programs, the brief hours when men will be on another planet.

Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., has visited our space centers and talked at length with astronauts and scientists whose professional lives are closely tied up with the moon.  He tells of not only their latest thinking about man's first tentative steps on another world –information essential to an understanding of the event itself –but also he manages to capture their enthusiasm for adding the moon to man's domain.

We begin with a crew of astronauts navigating their Lunar Module to a landing site, and the moment of first stepping onto the moon. (Man's first lunar footfall most likely will not be with his left foot, nor his right foot, but with both feet together.) We are told in detail how they are apt to react to being on the moon. (They may feel like old-fashioned deep-sea divers bouncing on a trampoline which has been set up on a slag heap.) In addition, we learn of conflicting theories about what they will find when they get there. Will they, for example, find life, if not on the moon surface, then perhaps under it?  We are told also of the steps taken against the possibility of their bringing back alien organisms from the moon. There are detailed descriptions of tools and equipment designed expressly to be used on the moon, including a moon car, a vehicle unlike anything that has ever come out of Detroit. No exploratory expedition has ever been equipped as curiously or as carefully as this one.

Mr. Cooper never loses sight of the people involved, for walking on the moon as well as being the product of overwhelming scientific precision, is primarily a human endeavor.  Written in vivid, entertaining prose, Apollo on the Moon may be read either as a program of the actual events or as a summary of what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wanted to do on the moon.