Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Reaching for the Moon

By: Roger D. Launius
Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

Fifty years after the Moon landing, a new history of the space race explores the lives of both Soviet and American engineers.

At the dawn of the space age, technological breakthroughs in Earth orbit flight were both breathtaking feats of ingenuity and disturbances to a delicate global balance of power. In this short book, aerospace historian Roger D. Launius concisely and engagingly explores the driving force of this era: the race to the Moon. Beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1, in October 1957, and closing with the end of the Apollo program in 1972, Launius examines how early space exploration blurred the lines between military and civilian activities, and how key actions led to space firsts as well as crushing failures.

Launius places American and Soviet programs on equal footing - following American aerospace engineers Wernher von Braun and Robert Gilruth, their Soviet counterparts Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov - to highlight key actions that led to various successes, failures, and ultimately the American Moon landing.

©2019 Roger D. Launius (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Apollo's Legacy cover art
How Apollo Flew to the Moon cover art
The Space Race cover art
The Voyager Program cover art
Apollo 1 cover art
Amazing Stories of the Space Age cover art
My Journey at the Nuclear Brink cover art
Not Necessarily Rocket Science cover art
Cold War: A Captivating Guide to the Cold War and Space Race Between the United States and Soviet Union cover art
Look Up cover art
Alien Encounter cover art
The Consequential Frontier cover art
The Bomb and America's Missile Age cover art
Wings of Fire cover art
Dark Fleet cover art
Stealth cover art

What listeners say about Reaching for the Moon

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Disappointing retrospective

I've read several different histories of Apollo and the space race, and found this one very disappointing. Two particular features stuck out for me:
1. It felt like it had been badly edited - the author repeats himself on several occasions which would have been caught by a good editor.
2. It reads less like a history of what happened as a retrospective sneer at the attitudes of 50 years ago. Everything is interpreted through the lens of 2019 and our modern cultural norms.
I would not recommend this as a starting point for anyone looking to learn about Apollo. It was a shock to see the author is a highly commended NASA historian - I would not have assumed so if this were the only piece of work I sampled. He knows his stuff, so I can only assume he was under the pressure to meet a deadline (Apollo's 50th anniversary).

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!