T-Minus: The Race to the Moon

by Jim Ottaviani

Illustrated by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon

ISBN-10: 1416949607
ISBN-13: 978-1416949602

"From Laika to the Lunar Module"

by Jack Shafer

July 12, 2009

The New York Times

The early space race was really a chase, with the United States trailing its superpower rival — the So­-viet Union — badly. The Soviets took a strong lead by tossing Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit in 1957 and smacking the moon in the face with the Luna 2 probe in 1959. Although the United States launched its first Earth satellite in 1958, its less powerful rockets had a tendency to detonate on the launch pad like short-fused bombs or break up after takeoff and sizzle like Fourth of July fireworks, or veer off course.

"T-Minus: The Race to the Moon," a graphic novel written by Jim Ottaviani, tells the story of America’s come-from-behind victory in the space race's main event — a manned moon landing. Ottaviani takes minimal liberties with the actual events to compress the great race into 124 pages: he deftly reimagines and expands the roles played by a few real-life aerospace engineers and contractors and imagines plausible dialogue for places where the historical record is ­incomplete.

The illustrations by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon (no relation) capture both the inky vastness of space and the glory of the big flying machines, but the book's primary subject is human emotions, not rockets or the heavens. Again and again, "T-Minus" — rocketeer lingo for time until takeoff — relies on close-ups to dramatize the life work of rocket visionaries from both nations' space programs, like Robert Goddard, Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev. It's about time the people who designed and built the spacecraft got top billing over the flyboys [darn straight].

Full review here:

http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/07/t-minus-race-to-moonnew-book.html