Moondust - In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

£8.99

“Moondust” is a piece of travel literature like no other, one could be crass and call it out of this world, but truly, this is a captivating read that will re-ignite interest in a very odd part of history. The Apollo Moon Programme has been called the last optimistic act of the twentieth century. Many say that during this short programme, it seemed as if a decade from the twenty-first century had been freakishly brought forward to the 1960s. Over a strange three-year period between 1969 and 1972, twelve men made the longest and most eccentric of all journeys and all were indelibly marked by it.

In 1999, Andrew Smith was interviewing Charlie Duke, astronaut and moon walker, for the Sunday Times. During the course of the interview, which took place at Duke’s Texan home, the telephone rang and Charlie left the room to answer it. When he returned, some twenty minutes later, he seemed visibly upset. It seemed that he’d just heard that, the previous day, one of his fellow moon walkers, the astronaut Pete Conrad, had died. ‘Now there’s only nine of us,’ he said. Only nine. Which meant that, one day not long from now, there would be none, and when that day came, no one on earth would have known the giddy thrill of gazing back at us from the surface of the moon, where onecould blot out the world with the tip of their thumb. The thought shocked Andrew Smith, and still does.

In “Moondust”, Smith sets out to find and interview the remaining moonwalkers and their crew in order to learn how their lives, and ours, were changed by this surreal adventure forever.