Product Description
Gateway to the Moon presents the definitive history of the origins, design, and construction of the lunar launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center, the terrestrial site of one of the greatest national adventures of the 20th century, humanity's first trip to the moon. It includes archival illustrations and diagrams of locations, personnel, and equipment, from aerial views of sandy, undeveloped Cape Canaveral to some of the first photos of the mobile launchers and crawler-transporters. Filled with the sense of wonder and pride that the earliest U.S. space achievements inspired, the book focuses on launch complexes 39A and 39B, the gigantic assemblies from which the Apollo-Saturn vehicles departed for trips into space, and on the massive eight-acre Vertical Assembly Building (renamed the Vehicle Assembly Building) and the attached Launch Control Center - some of the most awesome buildings ever constructed. It also analyzes the technological and governmental interactions necessary to ensure success of the launches. Originally part of Moonport, a 1978 volume in the NASA History Series, the book is based on extensive interviews with participants in the space program and wide access to official documents, letters, and memoranda; in addition, the authors air criticisms directed at the Kennedy Space Center team and treat in detail mistakes in launch operations and conflicts within the program. Written for a general-interest audience, with jargon and acronyms translated into everyday language, the book offers a faithful account of technology in service to humanity.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 3 reviews)

Could have been shorter - but a good look at different part of moon program

I have been interested in NASA and the Moon Program in particular and have built a small library of astronaut biographies, mission control biographies and a few chronicles of engineering of the vehicles. This book is interesting that it covers a different topic - the Kennedy Space Center. It is written as a history and does feel a little bit "official" in parts with details of contracts that probably most don't care too much about. I think it would have been great if the book had been edited down to about half of its 320 page size.
February 01, 2007

Catch the history you missed

It seems that today, when a space shuttle is launched, or a rerun of an Apollo Saturn V is launched, the Kennedy Space Center launch complex construction achievement is taken for granted. The media today skips the history of developing the launch complex.

This book chronicles the history of KSC, and includes histories of cost overruns, labor problems, design problems, and even political battles.

Many people who grew up during the Apollo era can recall the newspaper stories, however, if you were too young to have read these stories in the 1960's, this book is a great summary.
December 27, 2004

A Reprint of a Classic Study in the History of Spaceflight

In 1978 Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty published "Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations" as NASA Special Publication-4204. It was an outstanding history of the design and construction of the lunar launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center. Of "Moonport," a reviewer in the "Journal of American History" said in 1979, "The authors had access to official documents, letters, and memoranda, and they have apparently consulted all the relevant historical, technological, and scientific secondary materials...all the involved historians obviously spent con-siderable time studying and intellectually digesting technical reports and manuals in order to give their lay readers such lucid accounts of highly complex procedures and operations...it is important to public knowledge to have professionally trained his-torians employ historical methods to ex-plain significant events and place them in a meaningful historical context. Here is a broad lesson...that contemporary society can ill afford to ignore."

"Moonport" has been out of print for many years, and comanding a high price on the second-hand book market, but now it has been reprinted in a convenient paperback version. "Gateway to the Moon" contains the first half of the text of "Moonport," chapters 1-14 of the earlier work. For anyone interested in the race to the Moon, this book is a must read!
January 14, 2004

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Moon Launch! (The NASA History Series)
by CHARLES D. BENSON, ROGER D. LAUNIUS, William B. Faherty

Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles
by ROGER BILSTEIN

Go For Launch!: An Illustrated History of Cape Canaveral (Apogee Books Space Series)
by Joel W. Powell, Art LeBrun

Apollo
by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of S)
by Francis French, Colin Burgess
by Paul Haney