The remarkable story of the trailblazers and the normal Americans on the front lines of the epic mission to reach the moon.

President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on, may 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a guy in the Moon by 1970. No group was even more surprised compared to the researchers and technicians at NASA, who suddenly had significantly less than a decade to invent space travel.

When Kennedy announced that objective, no one knew how exactly to navigate to the Moon. No one about One Large Step: The Difficult Mission That Flew Us to the Moon understood how to build a rocket big plenty of to attain the Moon, or developing a computer small enough (and powerful plenty of) to soar a spaceship there. No one understood what the top of Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historical speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight encounter—with just five of those minutes beyond your atmosphere. Russian canines had more time in space than U.S. astronauts. Over the next 10 years, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send out 24 astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space airline flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to obtain America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.

Fifty years later, One Giant Leap may be the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account from the furious race to full one of mankind’s biggest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises—from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the amazing impact Apollo could have back on the planet, and on the way we live today.

Charles Fishman introduces visitors to the men and women who had to resolve 10,000 complications before astronauts could reach the Moon. From the study labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper developed the various tools to travel the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, as well as computer hardware yourself, Fishman catches the extraordinary feats of these ordinary Us citizens. One Giant Jump is the captivating story of women and men charged with changing the globe as we understood it—their market leaders, their triumphs, their near disasters, all of which led to arguably the greatest success story, and the best adventure story, from the twentieth century.