After the parachutes opened

October 10, 1:19 AMSpace Exploration ExaminerMary Beth Ellis

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Space Exploration Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

What's Apollo 12 Moonwalker Alan Bean up to these days?  Would you have guessed... he's an artist?

For obvious reasons, the Apollo program continues to capture the world's imagination.  In addition to the movies, documentaries, and, yes, action figures, a dizzying number of books have been published about the Moon program.  (My favorites are Jeffrey Kluger and Jim Lovell's Lost Moon: The Perlious Voyage of Apollo 13 and Michael Collins' Carrying the Fire.)  But most of these stories end when the program does.

Andrew Smith's Moondust:  In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth is something different.  It's not a technical book by any means; instead, it explores the lives of the men who reached the Moon after the mission was over.  Smith has struck on an interesting idea for a book, as it touches on the enormous emotional and personal toll of the space program in that era.  Many marriages of those involved, for example, were destroyed.  It wasn't happily ever after for all.

The book contains some fairly big smatterings of Smith's own memoir material, and he's not shy about including political commentary.  Also, since the chronology wanders a bit, the framing can throw a hit-and-miss reader.  But for those of us who were born after the program closed, it's a glimpse into the cultural pulse of the day-- and helps to fill in the rest of the story.