Book Review. The Giant Leap

One Giant Leap by Piers Bizony
Aurum Press
RRP $39.95

In just on three weeks time on July 20th it will be forty years since Neil Armstrong uttered the words “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” his delivery sounded as though he was reading it of a cue card but it marked a turning point in the way technology impacted on human society.

A new book, One Giant Leap has just been published to celebrate the event and it includes number of the photographs taken by the astronauts.

The book provides a brief background to the space race of the 1960’s; the Russians guided by Sergei Korolov and the Americans by the German rocket designer Werner von Braun.

It details the Russian space programme with Yuri Gagarin the first into space (also the incidental subject of the film Paper Soldier in the forthcoming film festival) and Alan Shephard shortly after for the Americans.

It provides all the general information about the American space programme and its impact on the country. In the1960’s NASA employed 30,000 people but a decade later there were close to 500,000 working for the space programme.

It also notes the wider impact of the space programme such as speeding up the development of software, metallurgy, precision welding and other physical aspects. There were also developments in areas such as personnel recruitment, management, risk analysis and information flow.

The book has a major emphasis on the Apollo 11 mission which put the men on the moon and its great asset is the pictures from that mission.

Several of the photos are apparently published for the first time in a general mass market book. It is fairly obvious why some of them have not been seen before; they are not all that great.

The three astronauts were equipped with state of the art Haselblad cameras and they shot close to 600 images but most of the time they were busy working with not much time for taking photos and the photo sessions were haphazard.

Astronauts at the time were always asked about what it was like to be on the moon. Buzz Aldrin described it as “magnificent desolation and Michael Collins was more perceptive with his comment that "I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher. We might get a better idea of what we saw”.

Looking at the photos of Buzz Aldrin (only one of all the photos taken on the moon show Neil Armstrong doing anything) going about his tasks on the moons surface it is understandable how it’s difficult to describe and why there were conspiracy theories about the whole thing being shot in a Hollywood sound studio.

The images are a mixture of the surreal and the unbelievable. The figures don’t really look like humans, you never see their faces and they rarely engage with being photographed.

But concentrate and the images take on their own reality and they start to make some sort of sense of how a couple of ordinary men had to cope with being in an extraordinary environment.

It’s a great book for a fortieth anniversary.