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    Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
    Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
    Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
    Audiobook14 hours

    Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

    Written by Andrew Smith

    Narrated by Matt Jamie

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    About this audiobook

    In time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing comes this edition of journalist Andrew Smith’s book, now updated with a new Afterword, that tells the fascinating story of twelve astronauts who ventured to space, and his interviews with nine of the surviving men.

    “Smith’s book succeeds…because he bungee-cords together so many intriguing digressions.”—New York Times

    The Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s have been called the last optimistic acts of the twentieth century. Twelve astronauts made this greatest of all journeys and were indelibly marked by it, for better or for worse. Journalist Andrew Smith tracks down the nine surviving members of this elite group to find their answers to the question ""Where do you go after you've been to the Moon?""

    A thrilling blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Moondust rekindles the hopeful excitement of an incandescent hour in America's past when anything seemed possible as it captures the bittersweet heroism of those who risked everything to hurl themselves out of the known world—and who were never again quite able to accept its familiar bounds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 25, 2019
    ISBN9780062937469
    Author

    Andrew Smith

    Andrew Smith has worked as a broadcast commentator and an investigative feature writer for publications including The Face, The Guardian, and the Sunday Times. He has also written and presented radio series and films for the BBC, including the acclaimed documentary Being Neil Armstrong. He lives with his wife, Jan, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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    Reviews for Moondust

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      At one stage in his paying writing career, the late science fiction author Bob Shaw found himself working for Vickers Armstrong in their PR office. He was often asked to write the stories of otherwise unremarkable pilots who had gotten themselves into one hair-raising scrape in their careers; so he evolved a technique that he called "Smithers thought back", so he could start and finish with the exciting bit sandwiching the bulk of the story which turned out to be not very exciting at all.It's a shame that Andrew Smith couldn't think of a way to do that for this book, because it seems to me that it has the potential to disappoint a lot of people. Inspired by the realisation that the number of Moonwalkers was a declining one, Smith set out to find and interview all of the Apollo crews remaining who landed on the Moon. But the trouble is that most of these people had fairly unremarkable careers after the Moon, because how could you follow that?Some went on to achieve "more" in a professional sense, though those stories will not appeal to the sensation-seeking public. others changed direction, or had epiphanies, or made some questionable decisions - just like the rest of us. This book really isn't about the Apollo programme, but about its aftermath for those involved. Along the way, we do get some insights into things like NASA Astronaut Office internal politics, and some viewpoints from some people who were flies on that particular wall, such as the BBC aviation correspondent Reg Turnbull. Smith's net even pulls in some of the Command Module pilots who flew to the Moon, but didn't get to actually land (perhaps the best known of whom, Apollo 11's Michael Collins, passed only recently).The book is framed by Andrew Smith's own experience, watching the Apollo 11 landings as a boy and then undertaking this project in his middle age, at about the age the Apollo astronauts were when they flew. Some have branded this as self indulgence; but for the vast majority of us who were not involved in any way with Apollo other than as onlookers, it helps us identify first with the author and then with the astronauts he meets and their families. I have no idea what it was really like to fly into space atop a skyscraper-sized rocket or to walk amongst the beautiful desolation of the Moon, but I can easily imagine striking up a conversation with a healthy-looking old boy one bumps into in a café and finding out that they have a story to tell that is unique and yet it only makes up a part of their life, possibly even the part they're least excited about thirty or forty years on.So: not a book for a nuts-and-bolts account of the Apollo missions; but as a study of nine men whose lives were changed by one extraordinary week in their past, and how the world both forgets them so easily and yet builds a very specific picture of them and what they should be like, a very useful book.
    • 2/5
      An interesting premise but too much shifting between analysis of late 60's American Zeitgeist & the space program. Whilst I appreciate a need to keep things in some sort of context this befuddled things for me. Not bad but not what you think
    • 4/5
      An absorbing read, though at times his journalist's style was a little annoying as he struggled to find sometimes over-complicated psychological explanations for some of the Moonwalkers' reticence, when it could more easily be explained as deriving from having suffered previously at the media's hands, or from simple shyness. I am much more positive about the Apollo programme than is Smith, but he argues his case fairly well and his final conclusion is that, marginally, the programme was worthwhile because of what it told us about Earth and ourselves.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting approach to the Apollo Moon landings as Smith attempts to interview the nine surviving men who walked on the Moon in order to gain some understanding of what it was all about. Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first Moon landing, and this book has helped me find some perspective on all the material floating around in the ether about the space programme. I particularly liked how Andrew Smith mixed in his own recollections of his reactions to the space programme. There are flaws though, the book rambles across the events of the space race leaving the reader with no real sense of the continuity. But the real message of this book is that as much as we may want our heros to be perfect, ultimately they are a very human and each astronaut had a very different perspective and reaction to their experiences in space and on the Moon. I should add that despite all the hype around the Moon walkers, for me, the real heroes are the Command Module pilots, who stayed in space, spending 47 minutes of each 2 hour Moon orbit in complete isolation, 'a darkness and aloneness you could feel' and facing the prospect that the Lunar Module may not be able to free itself from the Moon's surface, as Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot for Apollo 11, says 'My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone .. I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.'
    • 4/5
      The first chapter on landing what was not much more than a tin can on the moon is spellbinding
    • 1/5
      The Richard & Judy sticker on the front cover should have indicated this was an easy book. However, it was anything but. The prose is simple enough, but the story turns out to be a lot more boring than it should, as do the astronauts themselves. It was disappointing to note than almost all of the astronauts appeared to find something bordering on the divine after their return - especially when considering they were men more of science than religion. All in all, a turgid and disappointing read.
    • 3/5
      I slogged doggedly through this, determined to finish my first book of 2006 – on the 18th February! I wander bookshops these days wondering if I’ll find anything that takes my fancy, while many books at home sit on the shelf gathering dust.Moondust, potentially damned or praised by the “Richard and Judy’s Book Club” sticker on the front of the cover, was enjoyable but also hard work. Tracking down the surviving astronauts who actually stepped foot on the moon finds most of them dull in comparison to their experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many can’t put their adventure into words that mean much to the rest of us, and the author struggles to get to grips with why it matters to him. He reaches the conclusion that the Apollo adventure shone new light on the way we lived at the time, and continues to reflect back upon us. In a way, returning to the moon is a bigger dream now than the reality of many of the journeys that were taken, and the book is a lament to that fact.
    • 4/5
      This is really two books: A collective where-are-they-now biography of the nine (out of twelve) surviving moonwalkers, and Smith's reflections on what the space program meant to America then and what it means now. The two are intertwined, as Smith uses his interviews with the astronauts as a springboard for his own reflections. The biographical material is consistently superb, and Smith's observation that lunar-module pilots were more changed by the experience of being on the moon than mission commanders were is brilliant (and true). The cultural reflection was less satisfying for me, in part because Smith (for all that he was wowed by the lunar landings) doesn't seem to understand that, for a lot of people (including some of his interviewees and a large segment of his readership) space travel is not part of the past, but an ongoing enterprise. Still, this is a superb book, and well worth reading for anyone interested in the history of the Apollo program.
    • 3/5
      I read this immediately after Andrew Chaikin's definitive account of the Apollo missions. This is by a journalist who sets out to interview the remaining moonwalkers whilst they are still with us. So it makes for a nice up-to-date supplement to the Chaikin. Colloquial, conversational and witty including (almost inevitably) the subjective impressions the moon landing made on the author as a child. An easy read.