TEAM MOON: HOW 400,000 PEOPLE LANDED APOLLO 11 ON THE MOON
By Catherine Thimmesh
Houghton Mifflin, 2006
Category: Middle grade Non-fiction
I was born in December 1969, about five months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. By the time I was old enough to understand the gravity of the accomplishment (pun intended), much of the excitement and drama of the event had been lost to the routine nature of space travel. Space travel is never routine, of course, but it felt that way to me when I was growing up. As a result of this naiveté, the intensity of TEAM MOON took me by surprise. This book actually gave me goose bumps!
TEAM MOON is grounded by the 1961 challenge from President John F. Kennedy: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth.” Guiding readers through eight years of toil and discovery by more than four hundred thousand people (in addition to the three astronauts on the Apollo 11 flight, there were “the flight directors, controllers, planners, and engineers; the rocket designers and builders and technicians; the managers, supervisors, quality control and safety inspectors; the programmers, electricians, welders, seamstresses, gluers, painters, doctors, geologists, scientists, trainers, and navigators”), Catherine Thimmesh successfully re-creates the drama that surrounded one of humankind’s most incredible accomplishments. If you did not witness the landing—and this applies to a whole lot more people than just the middle grade readers the book is written for—TEAM MOON is the next best thing.
TEAM MOON has been nominated for a 2006 Cybil Award. You can peruse the other nominees in the Middle Grade & YA Nonfiction category here.