Before This Decade Is Out. : Personal Reflections on the Apollo Program

July 1999 marks the 30th anniversary of the epochal lunar landing of Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969. Although President John F. Kennedy had made a public commitment on May 25, 1961, to land an American on the Moon by the end of decade, up until that time Apollo had been all promise.

Winner of the 1999 Pendleton Prize

This significant collection of oral histories of the Saturn/Apollo program recounts the unique adventure of the lunar landing program as witnessed by some of the political leaders, engineers, scientists, and astronauts who made it such a success. It includes recollections from James Webb, the NASA administrator whose political connections in Washington extended back to the New Deal of the 1930s; rocket pioneer and architect of the Saturn V rocket Wernher von Braun; the resolute Robert Gilruth, director of the Houston center; the engineering iconoclast Maxime Faget, whose designs of spacecraft made flights to the moon possible; and astronauts such as Harrison Schmitt and Charles Duke.

These reflections on this unique time, place, and accomplishment are a must read for any student of space history and Project Apollo. The foreword by Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., former director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, introduces this extraordinary first chapter in America's space history.

Glen E. Swanson is a historian at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.