Books: Rocket Men

Tomorrow NASA plans to launch people into space from U.S. soil for the first time since 2011 to demo SpaceX's Crew Dragon 2. Without taking anything away from the ingenuity of the Crew Dragon's engineers, the mission seems just a little humdrum since human beings left Earth orbit 50 years ago on Apollo 8, in an era with no CAD and no Internet. That daring feat is recounted in Robert Kurson's book, "Rocket Men."

Apollo 11 gets all the glory, but it's difficult to understate how risky Apollo 8 was at the time.  The Saturn V had only been flown twice before, and never with anyone onboard, so the next logical step would have been to test the rocket with crew in low Earth orbit. To beat the Soviets to the Moon, though, NASA decided to use the untested vehicle to send William Anders, Frank Borman, and James Lovell farther from Earth than any human being had ever been. To put it in perspective - Crew Dragon will be about 250 miles away from the Earth, while Apollo 8 went 250,000 miles away.

The book does a great job of portraying both the technical and human sides of spaceflight, including the anxiety suffered by the astronauts' families and the strain of preparing for almost a week in space (ironically, the Hong Kong flu pandemic was roiling the nation at the time). I hope tomorrow's flight goes just as well as Apollo 8 did, so long ago.