LAUSR

mand module an affectionate slap, then turned around and walked away.” That was Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman’s matter-of-fact response to the mission’s end, as Jeffrey Kluger records in his book Apollo 8. When the week-long flight returned to Earth on 27 December 1968, Borman and fellow astronauts Bill Anders and Jim Lovell did not publicly make much of having pulled off the first orbit of the Moon. The rest of the world felt differently, and Apollo 8 is a valentine to NASA’s extraordinary achievement and the trio of astronauts who made it happen. Kluger puts the latter, especially Borman, centre stage, leaving NASA’s engineers and politicos in the shade. That is not surprising: Kluger is a veteran space writer best known for Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), coauthored with Lovell. If there is a weakness in this praiseworthy book, it is that it emphasizes the roles of the astronauts over those of the thousands of engineers, technicians, mission controllers and number crunchers who made Apollo 8 possible. Among these were the female mathematicians such as those in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures (William Morrow, 2016) and its film adaptation, as well as in Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls (Little, Brown, 2016). The emphasis on astronauts is evident in Kluger’s telling of the lead-up to the first circumlunar flight. Apollo 8 is best remembered for two things. The first is the decision to send a Saturn V rocket around the Moon after only a single Earth orbital flight — one of the gutsiest calls in NASA’s history. After a capsule fire during the 1967 Apollo 1 launch rehearsal, which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, NASA fell behind its schedule to land on the Moon by the end of the decade. It had planned to test Apollo hardware in the relatively safe confines of low Earth orbit, but to catch up, agency leaders concocted a bravura scheme to regain momentum by making Apollo 8 a lunar flyby. The experience and data acquired would, they reasoned, enable a landing — and demonstrate US technological excellence. This decision makes for a weighty story, but Kluger glosses over it and instead focuses on Astronauts (front to back) Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders head to the launch pad for the Apollo 8 mission.