THE RACE: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon.

• Author: Petit, Charles
• Position: Review

THE RACE: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon By James Schefter Doubleday, $2495

THOSE OF US WHO STARTED space and science reporting after Apollo know we missed something special. Not that a space shuttle launch isn't a stupendous thing. But reporters watching one with their mouths agape tend to get a slightly pitying look from old-timers who saw the Apollo moon rockets take off. Some say these were life-changing, almost religious experiences. Schefter describes the first one: "The ground beneath the reporters' feet began to tremble. It shook. It amplified. Reporters felt the Saturn 5 long before they heard it. All one thousand of them were screaming and yelling, `Go! Go! Omigod! Omigod!' ... No one was ready for this." When the sound finally hit them, the air crackled like nonstop thunder and roared like 1,000 hurricanes. It was more than noise; it was a force. "Reporters leaned into the shove and craned to watch that omigod rocket pitch over on cue to a straight east heading." When the rocket and its three crewmen were gone, "the reporters looked at each other and shivered."

What a difference a few decades makes. As the 30th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing came and went on July 20, morose old astronauts remarked in various ways that it has been an awfully long time since people wearing spacesuits did anything really new, adventurous, or heroic up there. They're right. The few missiles sent moonward since Apollo have been small, automated probes--the most recent mission was a little 350-pound craft called Lunar Prospector that culminated its mission August 31 in a deliberate nosedive into the lunar south pole. The hope was to spot water vapor in the puff of dust, a discovery that might make a longer stay on the moon more feasible some day. Don't hold your breath. Lunar Prospector's biggest achievement was its low cost: $63 million. When it comes to tax dollars, such economy is undoubtedly good, but it also shows how things have changed. When President Kennedy vowed in 1961 to nut a man on States had yet to put a man in orbit at all. Everybody knew it would be god-awfully expensive. It was, too: Well over $100 billion when corrected for inflation.

James Schefter covered NASA from 1963 to 1973 for the Houston Chronicle and Time-Life. He got to know the astronauts and the NASA officials who ran the manned spaceflight program and has kept in touch since. He watched intimately the many ups and downs of the...