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Building Apollo
A review of Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon
It tells the story of what it took to get the rocket from design sketches to the launchpad, the blood and sweat required to build a spacecraft capable of traveling hundreds of thousands of miles through the vacuum of space, landing astronauts on the moon, and returning them safely to earth. After a completed second stage was destroyed during pressure testing in 1965, further delaying the program and driving up the already over-budget cost, NASA sent a “Tiger Team” headed by General Sam Phillips to investigate North American’s Space division. Wernher von Braun, for instance, managed to build his rocketry organization in Germany, move the entire thing across a war-torn country to get captured by the Americans, and rebuild it in the homeland of his former enemy in his quest to put rockets into space.
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