For all of human history, the Moon was the very definition of unreachable ? a light in the sky to steer by, to worship, to dream beneath. And then, in a single decade, a nation that in 1961 could barely keep a man in orbit built machines that carried human beings a quarter of a million miles across empty space, set them down gently on another world, and brought them home again.

In Moonbound, E.B Cohen tells the whole of that improbable story in one sweeping, accessible volume. It begins not with a dream but with a fear ? the cold-sweat panic of Sputnik and Gagarin ? and races through Kennedy's audacious promise, the engineering gamble that made a landing possible, and the fire that killed three men and nearly killed the program. It carries you aboard every mission: the bold leap of Apollo 8 and the Earthrise that changed how we see our planet; the twelve terrifying minutes of the first landing; the explosion that turned Apollo 13 into a desperate fight for survival; and the final footprints of Apollo 17, undisturbed in the dust for half a century and counting.

Along the way, every machine is explained from first principles ? why the Saturn V had to be so enormous, how a computer with less memory than a musical greeting card guided men to the Moon, why the safest way to land was to leave most of your spaceship behind. Even-handed, vivid, and startlingly clear, this is the story of the greatest thing our species has ever done: how we reached the Moon, what it cost, what it gave, and what those footprints still mean.