Overview

For a very brief moment during the 1960s, America was moonstruck. Every boy dreamed of being an astronaut; every girl dreamed of marrying one. Americans drank Tang, bought 'space pens' that wrote upside down, wore clothes made of space age Mylar, and took imaginary rockets to the Moon from theme parks scattered around the country. ut despite the best efforts of a generation of scientists, the almost foolhardy heroics of the astronauts, and 35 billion dollars, the moon turned out to be a place of 'magnificent desolation', to use Buzz Aldrin's words - a sterile rock of no purpose to anyone. n Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard DeGroot reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans' thirst for heroes in an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting men in space. The moon mission was sold as a race which America could not afford to lose. Landing on the moon, it was argued, would be good for the economy, for politics, and for the soul. It could even win the Cold War. The great tragedy is that so much effort and expense was devoted to a small step that did virtually nothing for mankind. rawing on meticulous archival research, DeGroot cuts through the myths constructed by the Eisenhow

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Born in California, Gerard DeGroot is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He has written ten books on various aspects of twentieth-century history, most recently The Bomb- A Life, a history of nuclear weapons which won the 2004 RUSI Westminster Medal for Military Literature. He contributes to most national newspapers both in Britain and in the USA, and he has been a regular columnist for Scotland on Sunday.

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