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In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward.
A companion book to the landmark documentary series on BBC TV.
The journey from Cape Canaveral to the Moon was a tremendous achievement of human courage and ingenuity. It was also a long, deadly march, haunted by the possibility of catastrophic failure on the world’s stage. In an era when the most advanced portable computer weighed 70 pounds, had a 36-kilobite memory and operated on less power than a 60-watt lightbulb, the sheer audacity of the goal is breath-taking. But the triumph of imagination and the unity of the Earth that day would change the world.
Based on eyewitness accounts and newly discovered archival material, Chasing the Moon reveals the unknown stories of the individuals who made the Moon landing a possibility, from inspirational science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark and controversial engineer Wernher von Braun, to pioneers like mathematician Poppy Northcutt and astronaut Edward Dwight. It vividly revisits the dawn of the Space Age, a heady time of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama.
Rob Stone
Rob Stone is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, where he co-directs B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. He has published widely on European, Spanish, Basque, Cuban and independent American cinema and is the author of Spanish Cinema (2001), The Wounded Throat: Flamenco in the Works of Federico Garcia Lorca and Carlos Saura (2004), Julio Medem (2007) and Walk, Don't Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2013, 2nd edn 2017). He also co-authored Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (2016) and Cine Vasco (2016), and co-edited The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (2007), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (2013), A Companion to Luis Buñuel (2013), Screening European Heritage (2016) and The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (2017).
More by Rob Stone
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