It was my agent Laura Susijn who suggested I write this book. I, like many others, knew the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing was approaching, and I anticipated many books about it would be written. I was a little reluctant to be one among many. But then I looked back into my archive, by which I mean sealed cardboard boxes stored in my loft. I soon realized that it was a goldmine of information. Over the more than 40 years since I was a young man I had been collecting. As I started my career as an astronomer at the Jodrell Bank radio observatory, I began to meet astronauts, engineers and officials involved in the Apollo project. Such meetings increased as I moved to the University of London’s Space Science department. As I became involved in the media I started to be invited to receptions, press conferences and dinners with a growing number of my childhood heroes. In 1988 I joined the BBC as science correspondent and soon realized it was a job that opened doors, and that people took my calls.
Some astronauts, like Neil Armstrong, treated writers with suspicion. He disliked articles that featured him as a personality. Other astronauts, well, they could talk and talk. Often I would hear them tell the familiar story they had been giving to journalists for years; I sat through that and hoped they would open up when I showed I had a deeper knowledge than most other science journalists. I remember Alan Shepard did that, pausing with a mischievous glint in his eye when I asked him an unexpected question. Sometimes it didn’t work. More than one cosmonaut who had been involved in their Moon program pulled down the shutters when I asked something they considered awkward. Over the years I met all the moonwalkers and interviewed most of them, along with a great number of other astronauts and cosmonauts, administrators and officials. My boxes were full of tapes, notepads, press kits and much other stuff. Combined with what is available in NASA’s extensive archive, I decided there was a book to be written that put the people first and used, as far as possible, the words of those involved.
I would like to thank Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Cernan, David Scott, John Young, Alan Shepard, James Lovell, Charlie Duke, Donn Eisele, Alan Bean, Gordon Cooper, Al Worden, Walt Cunningham, Tom Stafford, Dick Gordon, John Glenn, Pete Conrad, Edgar Mitchell, Richard Gordon, James Irwin, Stu Roosa, Ron Evans, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra, James Fletcher, Thomas Paine, Joe Shea, Rocco Petrone, Brainerd Holmes, Bob Gilruth, George Mueller, James Webb, John Houbolt, Robert Seamans, Max Faget, William Pickering, Sergei Khrushchev, Viktor Savinykh, Georgi Grechko, Yuri Romanenko and Pavel Popovich.
I thank Laura Susijn for believing in this book and all those at Icon Books who made it a reality; also Nick Booth, who is a constant source of advice on space matters and good writing. He knows the life of a writer. More thanks than I can ever express go to my wife Jill and my children, Christopher, Lucy and Emily.
The night of the first landing on the Moon my father initially said I had to go to bed as the first footprint was scheduled for 3 am. I eventually talked him around, and watched transfixed on our black-and-white TV. I have never gotten over that night. My parents are no longer with me, but I hope they realized what that meant to a young boy. I think they did. I am sad that my children have not seen the like.