Review
We go up because something very deep drives us. Can it truly be that this Earth, this best and most loving of mothers, is no more than the home in which as children we have grown to independence and the will to go up? "This lunar beauty", wrote Wystan Hugh Auden in 1930 "has no history, Is complete and early;".A challenge: and the Space Race has a history going back much much further - as far as we can dig (while "palaeo-astronomy" has become a burgeoning research field). The race upwards was one aspect of the Cold War that has not led to bloodshed of man upon man (though time and chance alas have along the way claimed their casualties). Russia was the first to put a man, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit around our planet, the United States the first to put a man, Neil Armstrong, upon the Moon, Earth's one natural satellite (Jupiter has twelve, including the four most visible "Galilean" moons). But as Norman Cousins told the US Congress, "What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the Moon, but that they set eye upon the Earth". Today the Moon does already have a history - it has become a new terra firma, upon which twelve brave men have trodden, who are the beginning of the history of what may become a new home for our kind. One of these men, the seventh, is David Scott. Both he and the other author of this book (which owes additional expertise to journalist Christine Toomey) have found travelling between Earth and Moon to be a door opening upon a new life. And that simply is because so many years later we see all the more clearly that what they have given us each and every one is a needed Hope. May this book, and co-author Alexei Leonov the cosmonaut/astronaut, whose native tongue is not English, bear this message of hope to people whether or not they speak English. A. Leonov would have been the first man on the Moon but for America pipping Russia to the post. There is still everything to play for, and Europe too has a Space Programme. (Kirkus UK)
Arthur C. Clarke
'An extraordinary book that provides a very valuable account of the way the Cold War was ended in Space'
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