Commentary: Douglas Brinkley on JFK and America's grand, improbable race to put men on the moon
Sure, now it's old hat â the moon, yeah, been there, done that. But 50 years ago, the very thought, let alone the sight and the sound, of two human beings setting foot onto another celestial rock? Well, that took almost more imagination and more guts and more science than we could get our heads around. From five decades away, it looks like it was all neatly foreordained, but with the politics, the money, the personalities and the engineering, the moon landing was so far from being a sure thing as to make it all seem improbably quixotic.
The story of how it astonishingly came together is one Douglas Brinkley tells in his new book, "American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race." "Moonshot" - kind of like "long shot."
Q: One of the biggest takeaways from this book, as we look back at the 50 years since the moon landing, is that it was not inevitable; it was not destined to be. There were many things that could have made this not happen.
A: I got to interview Neil Armstrong and do his official oral history for NASA. Armstrong said they had about a 50/50 chance of having a successful mission.
President Nixon, back 50 years ago, was a little worried about having his fingerprints on Apollo 11, because if something went wrong, if we had dead astronauts in
