A story of the engineers at North American which had a large contract for the Apollo missions.
One recurring thread here is the human cost of the Moon race, and probably proporationl any high-stakes venture lasting many years. In addition to the Apollo 1 astronauts, many people did die to get the U.S. to the Moon, and many others burnt out or suffered breakdowns, or had their families broken up, or even a few committed suicide. They were engineers and managers overworked for years on end.
On pages 193-194 there's a recounting of a Norm Ryker having a heart attack after working through a weekend.
Some of the people who developed the B-70 bomber got into the Apollo program, where inside the industry that plane was a success even if congress or others didn't see a need for the bomber. Also mentions that the P-51 Mustang could be built in two halves and joined later, where if the fuselage was solid no-one would be able to squeeze inside to do any work.
pg 216- there were some 500 switches inside the Apollo craft, covering surfaces everywhere- obviously this is the sort of thing that could be better miniaturized now, with a few computers to hangle those 500 switches. I think the Chinese capsule used last year had a pretty modern interface, while I'd guess the Shuttle and Soyuz still have a lot of surface covered by controls.
The supreme discongruity of Richard Nixon happening to be president right as the Apollo program succeeded in manned lunar missions while his foe that had envisioned the project, Kennedy, was many years dead, is noted several times. The fact that the guy who ended Apollo program and otherwise drained any excitement out of the space program, and who also managed to be one of the worst presidents ever even as judged on more universal grounds- this guy gets his name on a little plaque that is put on the Moon for eternity. The author doesn't like that fact at all- it was originally proposed to put a microfilm with the names of some 400,000 people who worked for the government or under contract as a part of the Apollo program. In the closing paragraph, he suggests that if future Moon missions revisit the site, they should get rid of the plaque and put back the names of the people who made the it happen.
