Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0380802619, Paperback)

It began in the depths of the Cold War, with two nations hurtling steel chariots into the atmosphere, each vowing to be the first to the moon.Then, in 1961, John F. Kennedy challenged America -- and from Long Island to Cape Canaveral, Houston to Huntsville, an army of engineers, scientists, bureaucrats and astronauts were swept up into the effort. Somehow, America would put a man on the moon's surface and bring him back safely before the decade was over. But how?

For eight frantic years the engineers would design and redesign, the scientists would argue, and brave men would trust their lives to virtually untested machinery. This dramatic chronicle of the race to the moon takes us behind the scenes of this awesome quest, into the minds of the people whose lives were devoted to it and changed by it, and through the missions themselves -- including the tragedy of Apollo 13. A riveting portrait of ingenuity, determination, and raw human courage, Chariots for Apollo is the powerful story of how one society came together to reach its goal -- a quarter of a million miles away.