James A. Michener · 1982 · global

James Michener's 1982 novel of the American space programme, following a senator, a scientist, a test pilot and a German rocket engineer from the last months of the war to the end of Apollo. It is a book about engineering and politics rather than heroics, and it ends with a fictional mission that goes wrong in the least dramatic way possible.

1. 1
   Peenemunde

   On the Baltic coast the V-2 is built by a team that knows the war is lost and is already deciding which army to surrender to - and the American programme begins, in effect, with a decision about who gets these men.

2. 2
   Washington

   In Washington the programme is a matter of committees, appropriations and a senator who has to defend budgets he only half understands - and Michener is more interested in that than in the launches.

3. 3
   Huntsville

   At Huntsville the German engineers and the American ones build the rockets that will do it, in an Alabama town that becomes an odd enclave of physics - and the technical chapters here are the book's real strength.

4. 4
   Cape Canaveral

   From the Cape the whole thing is flown, from the first embarrassments to the Moon - and Michener closes with an invented final mission and a long argument about whether a country that could do this can also give it up.