The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo - Hardcover

Bizony, Piers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560257512 ISBN 13: 9781560257516

Publisher: Basic Books, 2006

Synopsis

One man, more than any other, created the giant space agency we know today as NASA: James E. Webb. The Man Who Ran the Moon explores a time when Webb and an elite group of charismatic business associates took control of America's Apollo moon project, sometimes with disturbing results. In 1967, NASA was rocked by disaster and Apollo was grounded. Webb was savaged in a Congressional investigation. Not just a matter of broken hardware, there were accusations of corruption at the heart of America's space effort. Some of Webb's political allies had been caught up in the biggest scandal ever to hit Washington prior to Watergate. The backwash unfairly tainted NASA's chief. By the time of the first triumphant lunar landing, Webb had resigned and his name had all but been forgotten. But he's the man who got us to the moon, and the power base he forged in the 1960s has kept NASA on a solid footing to this day. Washington insiders now acknowledge Webb as one of the greatest leaders in modern American history. No space boss since his time has wielded so much power and such a powerful story.

About this title

About the Author

Over the last decade, Piers Bizony has written about space exploration and cosmology for a wide variety of magazines in the U.S. and U.K., including Focus, Omni, Wired, and The Independent.

Bizony's award-winning book on the making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has become a standard reference work for the movie's many fans around the world. In 1997, The Rivers of Mars, his critically acclaimed analysis of the life on Mars debate, was nominated for NASA's Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Writing, while Island in the Sky investigated the politics of the International Space Station. Starman, produced as a book and a BBC film in partnership with TV producer Jamie Doran, told the real story of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's life for the first time.

Bizony is also a creative consultant for science-related public projects, having helped design a planetarium in Poitiers, France, and a science complex in Bristol, England, where he lives.

Reviews

Journalist Bizony's excellent corrective to NASA's mythologized history takes an unflinching look at how James Webb, a North Carolina farm boy turned Washington insider, ran his end of the space race as NASA's administrator under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Presiding over the agency during its build-up to the Apollo moon mission, Webb grew the agency into a research and development behemoth by leaning heavily on the old boy network: he called in favors, brokered backroom deals, bullied those who weren't in lockstep with his vision and commandeered vast sums of federal budget money-all the while driven, Bizony contends, by "pure-hearted ideals." Bizony shows both the spectacular successes and failures leading up to the Apollo lunar landing and discusses success's cost in terms of dollars, human life and political ambition. The book closes with a chapter detailing the crippling blows dealt to NASA by the Nixon administration, a time period that saw the beginning of the space shuttle project. Hampered by budget restrictions, NASA engineers had to design a "dangerously imperfect piece of technology" that later resulted in two famous disasters. Bizony laments the militarizing of NASA under Reagan and the "wavering" public support for expanding the space program, but this firebrand of a book should rekindle interest.
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The prosaic side of space exploration--the politics of the aerospace industry--is insightfully illustrated in Bizony's biography of James Webb, who headed NASA from 1961 to 1968. Webb's imprint remains on the organization for good and ill, and Bizony's consciousness of Webb's legacy--a post-Apollo NASA unsure of its goals--enhances his retrospective on Webb's tenure. A lawyer who cut his political teeth as a New Dealer, Webb believed in large-scale government-industry coordination, and thought he was creating a model of "space age management" in his leadership of the crash program to land on the moon. His model collapsed with the 1967 space capsule fire that killed three Apollo astronauts; an investigation exposed deals cut by the manufacturer that snagged the contract. This pork-barrel underside to the history of Apollo is a crucial corrective to the traditional emphasis on astronauts and missions, and Bizony carries it off with investigative determination while retaining balance. Emerging from the bureaucratic thickets with an ultimately praiseworthy portrait of Webb, this should circulate with the space program set. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560257512
• ISBN 13: 9781560257516
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256