With the 30th anniversary of the first moon walk on July 21st, James Schefter recollects his years as a cub reporter, covering NASA for Life magazine from 1963, when he was 23.
Life held the astronauts under contract, allowing Schefter close contact, and his admiration is evident through the anecdotes, the cheesy locker room humour or sadder events, such as when he unwittingly informed Ted Freeman's wife of his death.
NASA's coup in planting the Stars and Stripes in the moondirt ultimately emerged from American military aeronautics and German WW2 rocket science.
Dismantling the German war machine, the Russians shipped whole factories home, while the Americans cherry-picked the brains of the operation, such as Wernher von Braun, who had fired German missiles at London towards the end of the war.
Schefter frames his tale as a chess game between two unsung heroes. On the Russian side was Sergei Korolev, known only as the Chief Designer in Soviet literature, who died in 1966. In the US, there was American engineer-inventor Bob Gilruth.
In the 1950s, Ike Eisenhower held up the American space project, due to his distaste for an arms race. But the Russians were less squeamish, producing the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, and in 1957, the first satellite, a radio-transmitting sphere. Then in 1959, they put Yuri Gagarin up there - an achievement Schefter scarcely discusses.
The Americans got serious in the 1960s, particularly after Kennedy's speech to congress which set the agenda for a moon landing and indeed a deadline of within the decade. Kennedy even appealed to Krushchev on co-operation, but was rebuffed. Against the Cold War backdrop of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs, the space race became a propaganda game of one-upmanship.
One's heart is in one's mouth reading the detail of the Earth-orbit flights of John Glenn, Scott Carpenter or Leroy Cooper which saw them ratcheting up the number of hours in space to catch mostly Russian endurance records; the first space walk (American) in 1965 and space rendezvous docking of two modules in space in 1966 (another American first).
The Vostoks and Soyuzes and Voshkods vied with the Mercuries, Geminis and Apollos, as American technology edged ever closer to the prize. US astronauts wished Earth a happy Christmas from lunar orbit on 24th December, 1968. In May 1969, US astronauts came within 50,000 feet of the Moon. Two months later Apollo 9's Eagle module touched down with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. As Schefter says, America had won.
Shefter's jingoism is an irritant, but his style is fast and personable.
Still breathless after all these years, he captures little of the Russian campaign, beyond some facts and statistics - although he does go into the mental instability of their first woman in space in 1963, 25-yearold Valentine Tereshkova; and just weeks before the American moon landing, the huge N-1 rocket explosion at the Baikonur launch pad in the USSR, which killed more than 100 people.
There remains a far deeper story to be told of the space race, but this is a gripping account nonetheless.
Mic Moroney is a freelance journalist