This book documents the history of NASA's lunar rover program, and the accomplishments of the program and the astronauts involved. The book has 66 chapters divided into seven parts, so there is quite a bit of information.

The book starts with the history of NASA, and discusses some of the early important people involved in the agency. The chapters are fairly short, and the author moves through the chronology quickly. There is a great deal of information about the development of the rover, and I was surprised at how many fantastic pictures there were included in the book. There are several pictures of interesting prototype vehicles, and the people involved in designing them.

The last few parts of the book are focused on the missions that used the lunar rover on the moon, and details of the tests and maneuvers the astronauts were able to perform.

This was a fascinating book with tons of information, and I really appreciated the inclusion of all of the pictures. Even in black and white, some of the pictures show so much detail, that the pictures alone make the book worthwhile; even without all of the excellent information. I really learned quite a bit about these rarely discussed missions, and I hope there will be some documentary films made in the future about this subject.

Thank you Netgalley and William Morrow and Custom House for access to this arc.

July 21, 2021
REVIEW: Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift
JayneB REVIEWS / BOOK REVIEWSastronauts / immigrants / inventors / NASA / non-fiction / science / space flightNo Comments


8:36 P.M. EST, December 12, 1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt braked to a stop alongside Nansen Crater, keenly aware that they were far, far from home. They had flown nearly a quarter-million miles to the man in the moon’s left eye, landed at its edge, and then driven five miles in to this desolate, boulder-strewn landscape. As they gathered samples, they strode at the outermost edge of mankind’s travels. This place, this moment, marked the extreme of exploration for a species born to wander.

A few feet away sat the machine that made the achievement possible: an electric go-cart that folded like a business letter, weighed less than eighty pounds in the moon’s reduced gravity, and muscled its way up mountains, around craters, and over undulating plains on America’s last three ventures to the lunar surface.

In the decades since, the exploits of the astronauts on those final expeditions have dimmed in the shadow cast by the first moon landing. But Apollo 11 was but a prelude to what came later: while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod a sliver of flat lunar desert smaller than a football field, Apollos 15, 16, and 17 each commanded a mountainous area the size of Manhattan. All told, their crews traveled fifty-six miles, and brought deep science and a far more swashbuckling style of exploration to the moon. And they triumphed for one very American reason: they drove.

In this fast-moving history of the rover and the adventures it ignited, Earl Swift puts the reader alongside the men who dreamed of driving on the moon and designed and built the vehicle, troubleshot its flaws, and drove it on the moon’s surface. Finally shining a deserved spotlight on these overlooked characters and the missions they created, Across the Airless Wilds is a celebration of human genius, perseverance, and daring.

Dear Mr. Swift,

Show me a book about moon exploration and I’m going to want to at least read the blurb. What caught my attention about this one was that it was going to focus on the last three Apollo missions. When most of us think of the Apollo program, it’s 11 and 13 (the first and the worst) that people recall. With this book, I hoped I’d learn a bit more about the ones that have slipped our minds.

Let me be honest and say that this book is packed with details – sometimes too many, for my taste. The opening section recounts the events of the 1950s that lead to the beginning of NASA. There are some nuggets of interest here but I think most people who would be interested in the book would know most of this. What did make me smile was to learn about three immigrants to the US who had such a large hand in the space program as well as how many sons of immigrants played a role in developing the rover.

Then came some chapters that will make engineers sit up and wallow in the specialties of these immigrants, especially if vehicle-soil mechanics (how we travel over it) is of interest. I can easily see why this was so important to developing the rover which had to cross lurrain that no one had ever driven on but it’s stuff I had to work to keep myself reading. The following chapters were filled with more information about bidding for NASA contracts, spec requirements, and management of companies doing the bidding than I ever wanted to know. TBH, some of this was skimmed.

But the last third was the icing on the cake plus the cherry, too. The rover reignited public interest in the moon landings because it was going to have a car! I flew through the chapters detailing the explorations and science that the astronauts of Apollo 15, 16, and 17 were able to accomplish all due to their trusty rovers. The limitations of Apollo 14 – where the astronauts had to slog to and from their targets – highlighted the need for the mobility that the rover provided. Now instead of spending so much precious moon time getting to the areas to be explored, the astronauts were freer to spend their time collecting samples, taking pictures, and filming the awesomeness they were seeing. Reading their conversations between themselves and Mission Control were a hoot, too.

Was the expense of and the frenetic pace to develop the rovers worth it? Based on the rock and regolith samples brought back (including what is thought to be, at 4 billions years of age, the oldest moon rock retrieved) as well as the experiments that could be left in distant locations from the LMs that have, among other things, proved that the moon once had an active magnetic field, the rovers were a bargain. Plus the original design developed by one of the men involved in the project, though not used for the moon rovers, became the starting point for the rovers now crisscrossing Mars. B

Astounding History Of An Oft-Forgotten Era. One point Swift makes in this text is clear even in my own experience - *even as someone who has been to the NASA Cape Canaveral Visitor Center many times*: The era of Apollo after 11 and in particular after 13 is often forgotten in the zeitgeist. People talk about Armstrong and Aldrin all the time. People even talk about Lovell and Mattingly in Apollo 13 a fair amount (helped somewhat by the excellent and mostly realistic Tom Hanks movie and the fact that to this day, NASA sells quite a bit of "Failure Is Not An Option" merchandise).

But after that particular era is when the "real" lunar science began. And for that, NASA needed another tool that got a fair amount of (slightly inaccurate) press back in the day, but whose story has never been quite so thoroughly documented as this particular effort by Swift. That tool was the lunar rover, aka the "moon buggy", and here Swift does an extremely thorough job of documenting the first inklings of an idea that it may be possible through the early history of American rocketry (while not hiding one iota from its roots in Nazi experimentation) through the conceptualization and manufacturing of the actual rover and even into its impacts on modern rover design, such as the newest Mars rover, Perseverance.

The book does get in the weeds a bit with the technical designs and what exactly went into each, along with the various conceptual and manufacturing challenges of each. Similar to how Tom Clancy was also known to get so in the weeds about certain particulars from time to time, so Swift is in good company there.

But ultimately, this is an extremely well researched and documented book that does a simply amazing job of really putting you right there as all of these events unfold, all the way to feeling the very dirt and grit the final men to walk on the moon experienced when they had certain cosmetic failures on the buggy... millions of miles away from being able to really do anything about it. Truly an excellent work that anyone remotely interested in humanity's efforts to reach outside of our own atmosphere should read. Very much recommended.

I was drawn in by the cover (I love anything that has to do with space/lunar exploration), and by the book’s dreamy and poetic title. I soon realized that Across the Airless Wilds is much more substantial than that. Swift made me appreciate the tireless effort, long endeavor, and ambition of the thousands of people who made the initial moon landing – and subsequent explorations – possible. So many minds went into developing the lunar rovers even before anyone had any concrete knowledge of the moon’s surface. Yet, through trial, error, many failures, budget cuts, and years of development, the dream of making it to the moon was never abandoned (thanks in large part to the space race!).

The author clearly did a great deal of careful research, including conducting interviews with some of the key figures of the space age. I learned a lot: one fact that unsettled me was how much NASA/moon exploration owed to the Nazi rocket engineers. Though their rockets (when aimed at cities) led to devastation and great losses of life, they also made it possible for the United States to beat the Soviets to the moon.

Swift goes into great detail about the manufacture and development of the moon rovers. I never knew that there is a crater field in Arizona which was created to help astronauts navigate the lunar surface (road trip time?!). Though I felt that some of the chapters were bogged down in technical detail at times, I also saw the necessity of showing how much work and care went into the moon rovers. I truly enjoyed the chapters that detailed the astronauts’ exploration of the lunar surface; the author made it seem as though I were plodding through the lunar dust beside them.

I finished this book at a significant time. A week from now (2/18/21), the Mars rover Perseverance will be touching down on the Martian surface. I know that this would not have been possible without the decades of scientific achievement that had gone into the execution of the lunar missions. I felt a little melancholy thinking that, though NASA missions have broadened their horizons so much since the 60s, we have not been back to the moon since those final rover explorations. Someday soon, I hope, we’ll be back for more visits.