T-Minus: The Race to the Moon

Trying to tell the story of the US-Soviet space race is biting off quiet a large slice of history. Ottaviani and crew are only partly successful in this graphic novel approach to the tale.

There's a lot of good about this book. It tries to tell the story of the space race with as much of an eye to the Russian side as to the American. I had never heard of The Great Designer, Sergei Korolev, the sickly Soviet master engineer who was the Werner von Braun of the Soviet space program. The contrast between the stunning early Russian space "firsts" contrasted with string of the US rocket disasters was as eye-opening as the later American series of successes and Russians debacles.

That said, the book's missteps were irritating. Many launches are described with a single illustration on the sides of a page. Many critical missions of the Gemini program, which tested the ability of astronauts to rendezvous and dock in space, were "covered" in a few confusing throwaway side panels. And the attention paid to certain missions or events was out of balance to their importance. The routine orbit of Apollo 8 around the moon went on for page after page. Also, the arguments about which corporations should build the US space craft were hard to follow and borderline irrelevant. And Ottaviani more than occasionally got lost in depicting unintelligible NASA space-talk.

In the end, though, I came away a great deal of knowledge from this imperfect depiction of the space program, and the two-party race to the moon. Not a glowing endorsement, but a thumbs up, weakly, nonetheless.

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