Many astronauts from the Apollo program wrote fascinating books of their own. They provided valuable background material to help me visualize both the mundane and profound moments in a moon mission. I relied heavily on books by Deke Slayton, Michael Collins, Gene Cernan and flight director, Gene Kranz.
I think I owe my greatest debt to two magnificent, but very different books. One, a recent biography of von Braun, called, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, by Michael J. Neufeld. I had done research on von Braun for several years before bumping into this book. Neufeld’s work easily supersedes everything I had read before and became my bible for filling in the details of the rocket scientist’s life. Finally there was Andrew Chaikin’s definitive history of the Apollo Program, A Man on the Moon, without which I doubt I could have started on my novel.
Lunatics: Selected Bibliography
Cernan, Eugene and Davis, Don. The Last Man on the Moon. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Collins, Michael. Carrying the Fire: an astronaut’s journey. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
Jones, Eric M. Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj, 1995.
Kranz, Gene. Failure is Not an Option--Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Neufeld, Michael J. Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.
Slayton, Donald K with Cassutt, Michael. Deke!: U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1994.
Smith, Andrew. Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.
Woods, W. David. How Apollo Flew to the Moon. Chichester, UK: Praxis Publishing, 2008.